It's a common refrain among middle school girls: you just don't understand.
And it's true, says Marisa Egerstrom, who just finished her freshman year at Stanford. Early adolescence is a pivotal time, she says, when girls are trying to form an identity while grappling with puberty, peer pressure and parents who don't get it.
So, during her senior year in high school, Egerstrom wrote and designed a handbook to help girls cope with threats to their self-esteem. "There were a lot of things written by PhDs," she says. "What was missing was something coming from a girl." Egerstrom was inspired to write Lift Your Voice (Maple Tree Publications, 2000) after interviewing groups of 11- to 14-year-olds. The book's main topics -- stress, friendships, sexuality and body image -- come straight out of those talks. "They really can solve their own problems if given a forum," Egerstrom says.
Egerstrom's Minnesota school district was the first to use the book, after awarding her a grant -- the first ever given to a student -- to publish 2,000 copies. She has since self-published another 3,000, which Girl Scouts, health classes and after-school groups around the country have snapped up. At Stanford, Egerstrom plans to major in sociology, although she doesn't necessarily intend to focus on girls' self-esteem. "But the whole thing seems to keep on snowballing," she says, "so who knows?"
