That doesn't equate to "Be the best at everything you do." It simply means, "Be the most authentic light you can be in your daily round." Rather than just give her the opportunity to be the MVP of her soccer team or get to Level 3 in dance, you also need to teach her to smile a real smile-give genuine hugs-say sincere, encouraging words-take an interest in other people-find joy in the little stuff. She will radiate in her own way the light God is shining on her as a person, not just as a student, an athlete, a performer, or an obedient offspring. Your appreciation for who she is will bring that glow to her face and into her actions.

Be generous with yourself.

Let me clarify that for those of you who are so generous with yourselves you don't know how to say no and are so overcommitted you're living on Starbucks and adrenalin. This isn't about time. It's about being present. A mentoree of mine said to me the other day, "What I love about you is that when I'm with you, you make me feel like I'm the only one you have to think about, even though I know you have about a thousand other things you should be doing." I think she caught me on a good day, but I basked in that compliment because that is how I want the young women I work with to feel. And that's how our daughters want to feel. And that's how God wants them to be for their friends, their tasks, and their time with him. You do have other things to do besides listen to the latest tween girl drama in her life. But if you can give her five minutes of undivided attention, she will learn to be that kind of person as well.

The blocks to her authenticity will still be there even if you do all those things. Society will still try to tell her who to be. So will her friends, the popular kids, her fellow siblings, and sometimes even you (subliminally). But she will be so much better equipped to knock them down, get around them, or ignore them if she's consciously reflecting the love of the Lord. Help her do that now, when this will sound exciting and fun and special to her. As a tween she is at the perfect place developmentally to embrace the concept that God loves her and wants her to sparkle for him. Do it-and bring on the sunglasses.

Test Your Own Waters

There are several things I'd love for you to think about as you strive to be your daughter's ally in her journey to become herself. As always, handle them in a way that works for-of course-the authentic you.

Remember a time when...

In order to get your empathetic juices flowing, get in touch with your sense of humor and think of a time when you: told a lie so you'd fit in or wouldn't feel like a weirdo.

wore an outfit like everybody else had and felt totally self-conscious the entire time.

were at a party where you felt like an alien.

couldn't think of a thing to say when somebody you really wanted to be friends with started to talk to you.

snubbed somebody you liked because you were with people who probably wouldn't accept that person.

pretended to be fine when you weren't so nobody would know what you were really feeling.

not said what you knew because people might think you were a know-it-all.

If you can both laugh at yourself now but remember the pain then, you can be compassionate with your daughter and even share those experiences with her. Female misery truly does love company.

This is a little darker, but if you're willing to look at it, I think it may prove helpful. Did you ever deny your authenticity and find yourself: putting on a persona that so wasn't you?

becoming resentful and blaming other people for stifling you?

never feeling quite at ease?

losing your connection with God?

not being able to discover your purpose?

just doing what other people expected you to do?

rebelling against other people's expectations but not knowing what your own were?

suffering from anorexia, bulimia, depression, constant anger, or frenetic busyness?

Can you buck popular opinion?

If you have ever said or been tempted to say to your daughter, "Don't worry about what other people think," ask yourself if you honestly pull that off yourself all the time. See if you can remember the last time you kicked yourself for not saying what needed to be said or doing what should have been done because you were scared off by opinions. We're not talking mea culpa here. This is just another way to understand what your daughter is going through. For a little practice in being yourself, try this: Make a list of five things (maybe even ten) that you would do if nobody would think you were strange for doing it. Take pictures of insects? Try skateboarding? Dust off the old cassette player and listen to eighties' music wearing leg warmers? Let your kids cook dinner under your supervision? Choose one and just do it. Enjoy it to the hilt.

Dream of how it would be if you parented like nobody was watching.

Going for It

I'm sure that just from reading about the obstacles, you've already come up with ideas for how to help your daughter get past them to her true self. Just in case you're still baffled, I'm putting some suggestions out there for you to ponder and perhaps choose from. They're organized by the specific barriers your tween may face so you can pay particular attention to the ones that apply to her.

She insists on being the clone of the girls in her world.

If you can barely tell which one she is when they all get off the bus, your daughter falls into this category, and actually, that isn't all bad. First of all, to a certain degree, wanting what "everybody else" has makes sense in this stage of her development. She wants the same Crocs, headband, and hoodie the entire tween girl population owns because a sense of belonging is hugely important to her. As I've said before, this is her first foray out into the world where people don't have to love her. She's quite rightly trying to find a safe place in it, and her first step is to look like she belongs. We might actually be doing the same thing ourselves when we give that jacket with the shoulder pads to the Goodwill and shop for one of those cute cropped blazers "they" are all wearing.

Secondly, when she gets to school or church and her outer trappings are just like the other girls', she avoids being visually set apart, which actually gives her a better chance of being able to express other parts of herself authentically. If she isn't considered "weird" in the way she dresses, her friends probably aren't going to think she's "weird" when she says she'd rather paint this afternoon than practice cheers in the backyard again.

The trouble comes in when she thinks she has to have the latest trend for people to like her. You can help her change that particular conviction-the one that sounds like "Mo-om, they won't hang out with me if I wear tha-at!" But you won't do it by forcing her to wear "embarrassing" clothes that make her look like a misfit right out of the chute. Nobody's her best self when people are pointing and laughing in that way only tween girls can. You won't be teaching her how to be a strong individual. You'll be teaching her what it feels like to be mortified. The object is to let her look like she belongs to the pack but still encourage her to be an individual within that group. You can do it by: putting a reasonable limit on spending for the next big thing, as well as on the number of shopping trips that will be made.

making it a fun thing to discover her own style (more on that in the next few chapters).

coaching her privately when you see her talking, laughing, scowling, and hair-tossing exactly like her friends when you know her actions don't ring true.

Some of the "cloning" also has to do with tween role models. The clothes they "all" want are often patterned after teen idols. Wanting an outfit like Hannah Montana doesn't mean your daughter's trying to be somebody she's not. I would, however, monitor the celebrities she adores. So far Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus haven't fallen into the Lindsey Lohan/Britney Spears trap, so there's not a lot of harm in your daughter wanting to somehow capture their look. Just make sure you're there if her faves start shaving their heads and getting arrested for DUI.

Since she's already primed to look up to people, this is a great time to encourage your daughter to look at even better role models. A lot of tween girls devour biographies, so some doses of Clara Barton, Florence Nightingale, Corrie ten Boom, Maya Angelou, and Eleanor Roosevelt would go down really easily and give them amazing footsteps to follow in.

Another step is to get your daughter involved in something bigger than herself and her material wants and her obsession with fitting in. Volunteer work as a family, sponsorship of a Compassion child, a way for her to serve at church-activities like this not only get her mind off of doing-saying-wearing the right things; they bring out marvelous qualities she didn't know she had.

The cloning thing usually passes, but when it's here it provides some great teachable moments.

She seems dependent on the approval of her friends, especially her BFF.

Some questions you need to ask yourself include: Are there other things she'd like to do but won't because her BFF doesn't do them?

Does she always give in to her friend's choices about what to do with their leisure time together?

Has she abandoned former relationships or pastimes to spend more time with her BFF? Does she seem content with that-or is she whining, arguing, and talking back more than usual?

If the answers concern you, tell her what you're observing and ask her if she sees it too. Tween girls usually have an uncanny way of stepping outside themselves and looking at themselves objectively-far better than their teenage sisters. She's discovering "self-reflection" for the first time in these years5 and she loves doing it with some guidance. The girls on my tween blog are all over it when I ask them to comment on what color says it all about them, or how they react when somebody hurts their feelings. Their insights into themselves put some adults I know to shame. So this is a perfect time to process together how much of what they're doing is BFF dependence and how much is a new part of themselves they're discovering.

She shows evidence of self-hatred.

When Marijean was in her tween years, she exhibited some mild-to-moderately disturbing behaviors that didn't fit with the way we were raising her: outbursts of anger if someone told her she was pretty, uncharacteristic resistance to dressing up (except in costumes), and outright refusal to improve anything about her appearance because people might look at her and make a big deal out of it. Given her self-confidence and zest for life in other areas, that made no sense to us. Then when she was twenty-one her girl cousins, ages twelve and fifteen, revealed that their father had sexually molested the two of them all their lives. In his belongings, pornographic pictures of our daughter at age three were found.

She has no recollection of the situation, but hindsight explains her tweenage aversion to attention paid to her body, as well as other things that went down during her teen years. Jim and I like to think that the things we did right by her as she grew up kept the effects of that traumatic experience from being worse than they were. But if we'd known, we could have gotten her the help she needed. We would have handled some things differently. She might not have had to struggle with hating her own body.

I'm not suggesting that if your daughter is angry or self-sabotaging that means she's been sexually abused. But it does mean something is going on, and even if it doesn't seem monumental to you, if it manifests itself in any of these ways, it's something that can cause her to turn on herself: unexplained anger sleep disturbances physical complaints not accounted for medically circles under her eyes general lethargy unfounded fears regression into old behaviors It isn't a normal part of being a tween to dislike herself. If it's evident that she does, talk to her gently about what might be bothering her. If her relationships, schoolwork, and general well-being are being adversely affected, don't hesitate to get professional help. Self-hatred in the sunniest years is such a loss.

She's a perfectionist.

In spite of her straight A's and her flawless appearance and her spectacular-for-a-tween accomplishments, she is never quite satisfied, and she can wring everybody around her out with her anxiety over what she isn't getting right-things nobody else can even see. What to do? You can't really say, "I only want you to get B's from now on," or "For the rest of the season, you need to give only 75 percent on the soccer field." Her desire for excellence is part of who she is. It just isn't all that she is-so I suggest providing opportunities for her to do things that (a) she can have fun doing but doesn't have to be good at (games that totally rely on chance or non-competitive activities like tubing and jumping rope and climbing trees) and (b) that nobody has to be good at to enjoy (journaling, watching movies, reading, playing with hairstyles, throwing snowballs). She needs plenty of activities with no evaluation involved. Anything she can do for the pure joy of it will help her ease off on what she demands of herself.

You can expect meltdowns from a perfectionist, but don't let her wallow in her perceived failures. What went wrong? Can you fix it? Okay, let's move on. Help her honor her own mistakes. In the meantime, check yourself to make sure you aren't either modeling perfectionism or registering shock when she doesn't excel.

She has special needs.

Challenges your daughter took in stride up until second grade may now make her feel like a freak of nature, most of which is due to the reactions of other kids who haven't been taught that people with handicaps actually have feelings. While you can and should be her advocate in making sure her educational needs are met, you can't control the reactions of her peers, even when they stand in the way of her feeling at ease enough to be herself. But you can help her take charge of her own actions by: Not making everything about her a part of her limp or her lisp or her dyslexia. Those things impact her life, but by keeping them in perspective, you can help her see herself as somebody other than "That girl who talks (walks, breathes) funny."

Not making a huge production out of your advocacy. If you have to complain to the principal about the lack of wheelchair ramps or closed captioning on the audio visuals, keep that out of earshot of her classmates. She wants them to see her as normal. In so many ways she is, so give her that chance, rather than always calling the not-normal-for-everybody-else things to everyone's attention.

Realizing it's ultra-important for her to be like the other girls in whatever ways she can-her clothes, her "stuff," her language, her music. She already knows what makes her different. In order to feel comfortable enough to be an individual, she has to also know how she's the same.

She is, shall we say, eccentric.