Pipher explains the developmental considerations for adolescent girls and how it is important for therapists, parents, and anyone else who works with adolescent girls to try to help them from an empathetic and understanding perspective. The pressures of culture, social acceptance, and adulthood loom large over girls, and many lose who they are in the process. She then explains the concept of the self and how this self can split and be masked by a false self in adolescence. She describes adolescent girls as saplings who can be blown over by the storm of youth. She writes this book for girls everywhere who are struggling with adolescence and their parents, who are best equipped to help them through it. Pipher opens Reviving Ophelia by talking about her cousin Polly, a girl who was vibrant and bold in her childhood but who lost herself in the challenges of adolescence. They assert that girls in Mary Pipher’s generation in the 1960s, her daughter’s in the ’90s, and adolescents of today all share a common need for love, nurturing, and simplicity in their culture. Pipher and her daughter express concern for the wellbeing of girls in the age of sexualized media, substance use at younger ages, and constant pressure to be everything at once. The current edition is co-written by Sara Pipher, who became a writer and refugee advocate as an adult. It includes both original stories and new additions. The 2019 edition was revised to include the changes that occurred over the past three decades and to examine what is still the same. The book changed the way many psychologists, teachers, parents, and teens themselves viewed the struggles of adolescence and the sources of teenage depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders. She wrote the collection to bring awareness to the cultural trauma and dysfunction experienced by adolescent girls and to assist girls and women around the world with their healing process. The book comprises a collection of Pipher’s essays, which are based on the interviews and focus groups with adolescent girls she conducted with her daughter, Sara Pipher.

Reviving Ophelia was written in 1994 by Mary Pipher, a psychologist who works with women and teen girls, studying the ways cultural norms impact their mental health.

Raising ophelia book