If you are raising a teenage daughter, no doubt you could use some support. You will find it in Lisa Damour’s Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through The Seven Transitions Into Adulthood.

In this book Damour, who also directs Laurel School’s Center for Research on Girls in Shaker Heights, OH and writes a column for the New York Times’ Well Family Report, outlines seven transitions that adolescent girls must navigate on the way to adulthood. Identifying such transitions helps prepare us for their arrival so that we don’t feel so bewildered once they arrive. It helps prepare us for the reality that, just as we get used to a new “normal” everything can change all over again. It also helps us take care to experience each stage of development without getting stuck somewhere along the way.

If the idea of identifying stages of human psychological growth appeals to you, but you don’t have teenage daughters, you may be interested in Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World by Bill Plotkin, which identifies 8 stages spanning the entire human lifespan.

Reading such books helps us better know ourselves and our relationship to the world, to better understand where we’ve been and how it has shaped us. If the ancient Greek adage “know thyself” has any relevance, then I think it naturally follows that “know thy offspring” would, too. After all, whether we want to see it or not, they often provide a reflection of some aspect of ourselves.