Third, that kind of pressure starts long before the teen years. Your daughters feel it as early as second or third grade, and it hits its stride in grades four and five, so that by the time they reach middle school, they're being bombarded with it hourly, often in cruel ways.

What that means for parents is that just equipping girls with the rules, a set of rights and wrongs, is, though important, not enough. If a tween girl isn't developing a strong sense of who she really is, her true self can be swept away in the rush to belong in a community that doesn't even know what it is from one minute to the next. The eight- to twelve-year-olds I talk to on a daily basis know not to drink, smoke, do drugs, or get physically involved with boys. Y'know, like, du-uh. But they are already sick of trying to be cool and popular and part of the clique. They are crying out to be real. You can help them.

School is becoming more standardized.

No Child Left Behind (or as my educator friends call it, No Teacher Left Standing) has shed the spotlight on the shortcomings of our public education system and made schools more accountable, at least for standardized test scores. Their response has been to return to a more structured curriculum, more order in the classroom (in the form of zero tolerance), and more emphasis on the basics. Have you noticed that your daughter has more homework and more demanding teachers than you did? Is she more excited about math and science than you were, as opposed to the previously more "girly" subjects like humanities and history and the arts? Does she perhaps balk at the assignments that don't call for black-and-white answers? Does she stress about getting it "right"?

The result of "teaching to standards," which educators are now called upon to do, has its upside as test scores improve nationwide. Yet there is a downside, which is that we cannot expect school to be a place where our daughters can express themselves in authentic ways. The trend toward cutting arts programs in these tough economic times speaks to that. In Nashville, where I live, there is one music teacher for every seven hundred students in the school district. Drama and band programs are seen as "nonessentials"-in other words, there's no standardized test for those, and we have to be getting them ready to score well in math and language arts, so let's not waste time and money on frills. Self-expression, however, is not a frill. It's a very real part of helping kids discover who they are, which is just as vital to their education as their basic academic skills.

So the job of allowing your daughter to express herself into a true sense of who she is falls to you. Her generation is becoming left-brained.3 But her soul doesn't reside there.

Technology can eat away at individuality.

Before you write me off as a technology-resistant fifty-something who just doesn't get how important technology is to daily life in the new world-seriously, I do. I sit now before a computer with two screens. My email signals me every time I have a new message. My laptop waits in its bag for my next trip to a coffee shop that has free wireless. I own an iPhone that practically reminds me to pee, and if I don't blog and Facebook (which, I understand, is now a verb) daily, I hear about it. Especially from your daughters.

I wouldn't be able to do what I do without technology, and chances are you wouldn't either. The kinds of schedules you keep up with for your kids boggle my mind, and I know you can't pull it off without at least a BlackBerry Again, I really do get it.

I also get that your daughters are what Dr. Mary Manz Simon, the guru of trend-savvy parenting, calls "digital natives."4 Even if you didn't have a Blue Tooth device in your ear during labor, your child has no doubt always been very aware that electronics define much of her world. Computers are as natural to her as VCRs were to you. She's not afraid of technology. In fact, it gives her a certain air of superiority to know that she can operate devices with far more ease than her elders. My sister's eleven-year-old granddaughter recently taught her how to text. Tween girls who post on my blog are not shy about telling me if I would do this, this, and this, my pictures would load more easily or I could change fonts, you know, so it wouldn't be boring. No offense.

I don't begrudge them the labor-saving devices they get to use in their education. Who wouldn't rather look up facts on the Internet than plow through the Encyclopedia Britannica? Even as I'm writing this book, I'm remembering the agony of typing footnotes on an electric typewriter on erasable bond paper. Only on my crankiest days do I resent the fact that our tween girls will never have to endure that.

But I still have concerns. Will our mini-women depend so much on technology they'll become isolated from the very people they're constantly connecting with? I have a blog for young teens on which posters are constantly saying, "I wish I could be as real with my face-to-face friends as I can with all of you." I am so saddened by that.

I also worry that they are limited in expressing their uniqueness. There is a certain sameness in texting and Facebooking that, no matter how much they customize and personalize, seems to compromise their individuality. I see them in danger of being cookie-cuttered, only allowed to be creative within the limits of a MySpace page or a cell phone screen.

Another problem is that constant emailing and texting and Twittering and cell phoning could make them so dependent on peer support, they don't even know if they're okay unless they have their BFF within an instant's reach. It used to be bad enough to eat alone in the cafeteria. Now if no one's emailed them in the last five minutes, they wonder if there's something wrong with them. It's far easier to be in the loop than it is to be real.

Scheduling is now the biggest part of parenting.

Moms these days don't mean for it to be, but so often it's the truth. By the time you get them to school, participate in the book fairs and field trips-whether by physical presence or yet another check made out to the school because you yourself have a job to pay for all of the following-make sure they get to the after-school activities, make some kind of meal happen, supervise (or referee) homework, and get everybody ready to do the whole thing again tomorrow-is there actually time for all the things you thought parenting was about? You know, like teaching life lessons, sharing everybody's day at the dinner table, lingering over the tucking-in to say prayers and tell stories. You dreamed of that, didn't you?

And then the world took over. Sure, you could take your daughter out of everything and try to recreate a nostalgic fifties' cookies-and-milk-after-school atmosphere in your home, but a nagging anxiety would creep in that you were cheating her of all that's out there for her, all the things her friends are taking part in. You'd sense that she was perhaps falling behind and would soon become a gymnastics-less, soccer-challenged, piano-deprived misfit. You're a good mom. You can't do that to her. It's the way things are and you're coping with it, and probably pretty well.

I really do believe that, so please know that this is not at all a criticism. It's merely an observation that you might want to look at. Yes, I'm seeing tween girls who are gaining great confidence and team spirit from participating in sports, who are exhibiting tremendous poise and grace from performing in dance, gymnastics, and musical endeavors, who have a deep spiritual awareness because of their involvement in church life. At the same time, when I suggest to them that they take some time to dream or journal or talk to God, I often get very adult-sounding responses: "My schedule's pretty tight. I don't know if I have time."

"My plate's already full."

"If I add another thing to my day, my head's going to explode!"

These are nine-, ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds. Most of them love what they're doing, or they at least know the importance of it, and no doubt they're learning things about themselves in the process. But when do they sort that through? When do they process it? What chance do they have to express it or experiment with it or even have a good cry over it?

I have a very real fear that they will become capable, efficient, accomplished young women who have no clue what lies under all their achievements. The more they add to their reesumes-and at twelve many of them are already thinking about what their college applications need to look like-the more what they do defines who they are. That's certainly a part of the big picture, but it isn't all of it. The discovery of self that used to naturally occur when kids took off on their bikes after school and weren't seen again until Dad stood out in the front yard and gave the family whistle doesn't happen now unless the parents are intentional in finding other ways for their daughters to simply be.

"I'd like for my mom to know that sometimes we have to face stuff on our own, and sometimes we need to be alone to figure it out."

age 11.

Failure isn't an option.

It used to be, as recently as the early nineties, that grades didn't really "count" until high school. A student could barely scrape through middle school, suddenly decide to make the honor roll, and emerge as valedictorian. It didn't usually happen that way, but kids were told it could, and some actually did gear up for freshman year, knowing that now it "mattered."

These days, it starts "mattering" in kindergarten, sometimes even before, as moms shop for preschools the moment that little blue line comes up on the pregnancy test. Success in kindergarten means reading on a second-grade level. Virtually babies still, first and second graders have hours of homework. Fourth and fifth graders carry backpacks that not only make them look like Quasimodo, but are sentencing them to years of chiropractic treatment. My own observations indicate that tweens are either stressing to compete for the top grades, or they've already defined themselves as "losers" and have basically given up.

And it's not just in the classroom where the pressure's on to excel. Girls are competing in sports earlier than ever, and even the least likely to ever kick a ball professionally are being assured that if they work hard enough, they can get an athletic scholarship. Not that college is on their minds at ten, but hey, we have to prepare for the future, right? Could some promise shown in gymnastics or skating mean the Olympics are a possibility? If she plays the piano or the violin this well now, should we be thinking about Julliard? Carnegie Hall?

I am not saying that we shouldn't dream big for our daughters, or even that we should refrain from encouraging them to dream for themselves. What little girl who has ever put on a pair of ballet slippers and a tutu hasn't dreamed of debuting as Clara in The Nutcracker? The issue we can run into in today's culture is the seriousness behind it all. These are uncertain financial times; where is the money for college going to come from? The number of college applicants is increasing, but the number of colleges isn't. Nineteen thousand high school seniors applied to Vanderbilt University last year. Sixteen hundred were accepted. If our daughters are going to be able to compete in that arena, don't we have to start preparing them now?

And what about failure in life choices? Having sex still carries with it the danger of pregnancy or STDs-but now we've added HPV, which is linked to cervical cancer. If we don't make sure she remains a virgin, couldn't she actually die? Twelve- to seventeen-year-olds made up 8 percent of substance abuse treatment admission in 2006, and made up nearly half of all admissions who say they used inhalants, which can cause severe damage, even death.5 One bad decision and might we not lose her forever?

And what about her soul? There are so many religious options...don't we have to guarantee that she won't stray from the Christian faith, even for a moment? Don't we have to shelter them so there's no chance that they'll turn out to be shoplifters or exotic dancers?

Talk about the pressure your daughter is under-you are dealing with 10,000 PSI on her behalf. There's no margin for error. She has to get it right, and you're responsible for that.

Or at least that's the way it seems. After a certain point, I tend to disagree. Your daughter is eight, nine, ten, eleven, or twelve years old. There is no way she is not going to come up short on something. And why not? So much of her education about herself and how she fits into the world comes from the mistakes she makes, the bad choices she opts for, the immature decisions that happen on the spur of the moment. If she isn't allowed to make some personal choices now and suffer consequences that are not life-threatening, she is only going to know how to be "good," maybe a "high achiever," perhaps a "success" in some field. But she's not going to know what makes her who she is as an individual. If you never allow her to "fail," she most assuredly will.

It may be harder than it has ever been for a tween girl to discover who she is. But who she is, is in there. She can either become an unconscious, twisted version of it, or she can be the deliberately true version. With society being what it is, you are her best chance of discovering and living into the latter. Even with all the other voices calling to her, yours is still the one she hears most clearly.

It won't be that way forever. You will still have influence on her when she becomes a teenager, but exerting it then can be far more of a battle than it is when she's a tween. Why not connect with her now, when it can be delightful for both of you-before you hear yourself saying what the mother of a young teenager said to me just this morning: "I have never been as annoying to another human being as I am to my thirteen-year-old daughter." As I recall, just last year she was telling me what a great relationship they had.

Yeah. Do it now.

From the Ultimate Parent.

I'm convinced, especially after writing the features for the FaithGirlz Bible, that the whole gospel is about authenticity. Seriously. Jesus talks about real faith-the true worshipers worshiping in spirit and in truth. He gets into the faces of the Pharisees for being hypocrites, and holds up children, the most transparent of beings, as examples for us all. He's constantly telling us to get real, because we can't be truly saved any other way. I quote again the passage you found at the beginning of this chapter: "Whoever did want him, who believed he was who he claimed and would do what he said, he made to be their true selves, their child-of-God selves" (John 1:11-12).

"I told her she needed to be herself, that God had made her exactly the way he wants her to be for the things that he has planned for her. What she said next was heartbreaking. She said, 'I don't even know who I am.'

Mother of a.

12-year-old.

You don't have to take my word for it that authenticity is essential to your tween daughter. Jesus beat me to it a long time ago. "It's who you are, not what you say and do, that counts," he says in Luke 6:45. "Your true being brims over into true words and deeds."

In John 3:6, he tells us, "When you look at a baby, it's just that: a body you can look at and touch. But the person who takes shape within is formed by something you can't see and touch-the Spirit-and becomes a living Spirit."

That concept was familiar to his listeners. "He has shaped each person in turn," a psalmist had written centuries before. "Now he watches everything we do" (Psalm 33:15).

I don't think we can deny that God put a "self" in that baby girl long before you knew her, so it pretty much follows that you as her mom have a responsibility to help her coax it out and embrace it. Isaiah, bless his outspoken, prophetic heart, puts it in even stronger terms: "You have no right to argue with your Creator. You are merely a clay pot shaped by a potter. The clay doesn't ask, 'Why did you make me this way?'" (Isaiah 45:9). I have to admit I prefer the way one of my favorite Christian nonfiction authors, Dan Allender, expresses it: "We read our children as God wrote them."6 There it is. God says it. But as always there's the question-"Okay, but what does that look like?" You're convinced she needs to be herself, but how does God mean for you to help her do that? We're going to talk about a number of things you can look at and try. The following are the ones I see as arising directly from the Spirit.

Be content with who she truly is.

If she isn't a math whiz, so be it. Okay, so yeah, the best jobs of the future may require a solid arithmetic skill set, but if that isn't her, it isn't her. God's got something else planned. She's not as outgoing as you think she needs to be in order to survive the looming giant, middle school? You're not going to turn her into an extrovert, so don't try. You can mold a basic sense of caring and consideration (because children are born totally self-centered, after all!), but you can't "make" her into anything she isn't. She's destined by God to take a certain shape. Don't re-form it. Just love it. Only things that go against what you know of God are not "her." "You're blessed when you're content with just who you are-no more, no less," Jesus says in his marvelous recounting of the Beatitudes. "That's the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can't be bought" (Matthew 5:5).

Give her opportunities to serve, rather than constantly being served.

She's privately chauffeured, provided with every chance to experience whatever she wants to, and sheltered like a crown princess. That speaks well of you as a parent. It also explains why this era of child-raising is already known as the Age of Entitlement.7 You can be an even better parent if you require consistent help around the house, a commitment to treating members of the family with respect, and encouragement to do things for other people when she really doesn't "have to"-as in, there's nothing in it for her. And yet there is.

"Do you want to stand out?" Jesus says. "Then step down. Be a servant. If you puff yourself up, you'll get the wind knocked out of you. But if you're content to simply be yourself, your life will count for plenty" (Matthew 23:12). It's almost impossible to be anything other than genuine when you're absorbed in meeting someone else's needs. Your daughter isn't too young to experience that.

Teach her to let Jesus lead.

All of us Christians say it: "Jesus Christ is master of my life." And then most of us go ahead and do what we want or what the world expects or what's going to get us through the next half hour without smacking somebody. The reason for that, of course, is that our lives are so full and complicated and downright frenetic. But despite their crowded schedules, tween girls aren't faced with the same degree of complexity that we are. It's so much simpler for them to take each issue they face to the Lord and then clearly see how it's resolved. I love this passage: Then Jesus went to work on his disciples. "Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You're not in the driver's seat; 1 am. Don't run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I'll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for?"

Matthew 16:24-26.

Model authentic worship.

When Jesus was coaxing the genuine article out of the woman at the well, he said to her: "It's who you are and the way you live that count before God. Your worship must engage your spirit in the pursuit of truth. That's the kind of people the Father is out looking for: those who are simply and honestly themselves before him in their worship." And just in case she didn't get it (most of us don't the first time through), he added: "God is sheer being itself-Spirit. Those who worship him must do it out of their very being, their spirits, their true selves, in adoration."

When I read that, I don't get an image of a chaotic Sunday morning getting everybody dressed, fed, and out of the house-fighting en route about who didn't brush their teeth and who doesn't want to go to Sunday school-delivering everyone to their respective classrooms-catching about half of what goes on in your own class because you're still reliving the fight in the car-regrouping all of them for the worship service and going through the motions while you try to keep your brood from scribbling on the back of the pew, texting during the sermon, and dozing off while the anthem is being sung. And that's just your husband.

Okay, so I'm exaggerating, but I've never known a churchgoing mother yet who didn't own up to the fact that her "true worship" was compromised by squirming, whispering, yawning children. Some of that's unavoidable. Kids aren't programmed to sit still, and let's face it, most sermons aren't written with them in mind. But some of it comes from focusing on whether your offspring are bothering anybody. Tween girls are seldom the culprits. Can the younger ones hang out in the nursery (or be administered a dose of Dramamine-JK!) so you and your daughter can share a worship experience?

Can you bring your true self to the occasion? Are you naturally inclined to sing your heart out? Raise your hands in the air? Respond verbally to the sermon? (Hopefully not with, "You lie, brother!") Or is it more you to become quiet and reverent, hands folded, lips whispering? Whatever is natural when you go into the house of the Lord, that's what your daughter needs to see-not to copy it, but to know that it is a good and joyful thing to get real when you worship.

Again, if authentic worship means waiting until younger children can do the same before dragging them into the sanctuary, their spiritual formation won't be stunted. If it takes shedding some of your church commitments so you can concentrate on praising and praying and filling your well, the place isn't going to fall down around you. Seriously, if your young daughter can't be herself before God, how can we expect her to be so in front of people who don't love her unconditionally the way he does? Sounds like a priority to me.

"The most important thing my mom taught me is to love Cod and have a relationship with him. They've always encouraged me in this area, which I know I do take for granted-not everyone's parents are Christians, which can make life kind of harder."

age 12.

Honor her doubts and questions.

I know it seems like if we could just indoctrinate them in the faith now, give them a solid, certain foundation, they'll never waver. To some moms that translates as never exposing them to any other religion, making sure they have only Christian friends, only going to church-sponsored social events, sacrificing so they can go to a Christian school, or making the supreme sacrifice and homeschooling them. None of those things are harmful in and of themselves. Certainly we want our girls to know as much about Jesus Christ as they possibly can and to love him and serve him and follow him.

Where I cringe is when I hear girls say: "Is it okay that sometimes I wonder if God's really there? I'm asking you because I'm afraid to ask my mom." Is there any one of us who can honestly say she hasn't agonized over a failed relationship or mourned the untimely loss of a loved one or rocked a screaming baby and thought, "Where are you, God? What-did you lose my address?" When God answers in some concrete way or in his still, small voice, "I'm here. What do you need?" our faith is strengthened beyond the mere recitation of the creed. Doubting and questioning are an integral part of the growth of our faith-and it's no different for our daughters.

I look at it this way: You have faith, so you spend time with God. While you're hanging out-praying, reading the Bible, meditating on your experiences and how they're lining up, or not lining up, with what you think you know of God, questions come up. Why do bad things happen when I'm being so faithful? Why are some people literally getting away with murder? Why is he saying one minute that I'm mere dust in the wind, and the next he's saying I own the universe? Those questions naturally create doubt. You want those doubts resolved, so you hang out more with God, searching together for the answers. When you find them, you have even more faith, which means more time spent with God, which leads to even deeper questions, more troubling doubts, more stunning answers, and a faith that grows more solid with every new question.

I can almost hear you protesting: I can do that. I'm an adult. But who's to say my daughter won't be led off on some tangent while she's doing all this questioning?

First of all, nobody said she'd be doing this by herself. You'll be the one teaching her about the things that will hold her up in the process. Conversations with God in prayer. Learning to read the Bible. Authentic worship. And mentors-like you. If you allow it, you are the one she will come to with her questions and her doubts; you'll be the one who assures her that doubt is not the opposite of faith, but an important part of it. You'll be the one who refuses to judge her or pitch a hissy fit if she says, "Did Jesus really come back from the grave? I mean, seriously?" You are the one who will say, without horror, "He really did-but why do you ask?"

Undergirding all of that, of course, is God himself. Remember the parent who came to Jesus asking him to heal his child who had suffered from seizures all his young life? He himself was stricken with a certain amount of doubt. "If you can do anything," he said, "do it. Have a heart and help us!" (Mark 9:22).