As my daughter was approaching 10, I read Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (Ballantine, 1995). It left me feeling disheartened and a little panicked. Although my daughter was still doing great, I worried that she would soon start hating me, and I wondered if there was anything I could do to prevent that. I figured that if others were reading Ophelia too, then someone out there must be doing something to help parents positively influence our girls’ transition into womanhood.

What I found was Girls’ Circle, a nonprofit organization that trains adult facilitators to get girls talking with each other. A friend and I signed up right away for an intensive two-day training at the YWCA in San Francisco. One of our trainers, a founder of Girls’ Circle, began the workshop by explaining her own motivation.

“When I discovered the satisfaction of sitting with a group of women and talking about my life, I thought, ‘Why should girls have to wait until they’re adults to experience this kind of communication?’”

The training emphasized how to ask girls questions that elicit conversations. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. How do you ask girls to talk about their strengths when so much of what they see in this culture portrays young women as nothing more than window-dressing?

Within weeks of the training, Maria and I sent flyers home with girls from my daughter’s school about starting our own Girls’ Circle. Seven girls responded, and we went for it. Unknowingly, we had scheduled the first meeting on a field trip day, leaving only three girls who could attend. Already nervous, my insecurities grew as I learned that the two girls other than my daughter hated each other because of a teasing incident at school.

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