The Quiet Collapse of Girlhood

Why can't society seem to stand women—at any age—and what happens when we start rewriting the rules ourselves?

Apr 09, 2025

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It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment someone transforms from a child into an adult. For so many women, this transition takes place much sooner than it should. The cards we are dealt often require us to ignore the round, freckle-faced girl staring back at us in the mirror and project, from the deepest part of our lacked experience, a woman who is both unafraid and fully grown.

There is an indescribable difference between the transition from child to adult and the encompassed moment that a girl becomes a woman. This isn’t to say that the boulders of burdens placed on the backs of boys as they march into manhood aren’t just as unsettling and worthy of exploration, but only to illuminate the fact that the path to becoming a woman bleeds into girlhood much sooner and is traced with hidden land mines.

The repercussions for the body of a man housing the mind of a boy seem to slip silently through the cracks of society’s scrutiny. Meanwhile, if the expectations placed on a young girl to tiptoe to the edge of life’s diving board and jump into womanhood, at just the right moment, aren’t met in perfect timing – the critics seem to screech at a decibel that makes its way around the world.

Jump too soon, and your childlike innocence is robbed from you overnight. You are a siren, a slut, a girl who has embraced her power over the world around her too soon. You are untamed, too loud, too much. Society is quick to judge and even quicker to punish girls like this. The only accepted remedy is to retreat silently back to where they believe you belong, wiping away the traces of your favorite red lipstick and brushing through the curls looped into your mousy blonde hair.

Jump too late, and you are a sad case, a basket case, a girl who could have been somebody but squandered away her two most valuable possessions: her youth and her beauty. Of course, when we are our best selves, we are wide awake to the fact that, despite which box we are unwillingly shoved into, neither could ever hold the dynamic duality of being a woman.

Unfortunately, we are all rarely our best selves. Whether we are a man, a woman, or something undefined, we are all forced into the uncomfortable condition of being human. We can’t help but buy into the insecurities created by the lies people tell us about who we are, what we’re worth, and what we are capable of.

Through a series of interviews for this essay, I explored the lives and experiences of four dynamic women and learned how the tipping point between girlhood to womanhood played a role in the major pillars of their lives

Relationships
Identity and Self-Perception
Career and Motherhood
Health and Wellness
Independence and Responsibility

We discuss the magic of being a girl, what it is to be a woman, and how to walk the fine line of maturing at a pace that allows us to hold onto our childlike wonder while still becoming the women we are destined to be.

Before turning back the clock with some of the women I interviewed, I knew I had to keep my feet firmly planted in the present to see the full picture of why this transition is such a delicate and complicated time in a young woman’s life.

My sister is a proud member of Gen-Z. At just 16 years old, she is hurtling at light speed to the very edge of girlhood, desperate to leave behind her days of make-believe and lemonade stands in exchange for, as she puts it, “complete freedom.”

As her sister, I wish I could implant the wisdom of time into her mind and have it trickle down into every cell of her body – the understanding that being a kid IS complete freedom, and everything beyond this very brief moment is quite the opposite.

She is no longer the rosy-cheeked little girl that I keep her frozen as in my heart. Every day she looks more and more like a grown woman. Her body curves in ways mine never has. Her once thin towhead locks are now thick, long, and dark blonde. The over-lining of her lips still feels shocking and inappropriate as she floats out of her room and down the stairs for family dinner during my latest trip home. It’s as if my eyes have not yet adjusted to the idea of her having grown beyond the age of five. How can she be wearing makeup? She’s just a baby.

I catch myself realizing that the desire to keep women as girls until we are ready for them to be women isn’t always something we do consciously or with ill intent. However the feelings that arise for us when someone we have known as one thing is ready to blossom into another is not their burden to bear but ours alone to process.

Just because I’m not ready for my sister to stop being a kid doesn’t mean she isn’t ready. Of course, I want her to cherish every minute of being this young, but she is my sister after all, and I should know better than to think any daughter of my mother’s can be stopped from doing exactly what she wants to do, when she wants to do it.

I didn’t have to ask my sister a single question about girlhood to know exactly how she feels about it. You can see her answer very bluntly stated in the way she speaks, what she wears, and how painfully uncool it is for us to treat her as the kid we wish her to be. Soon she will be driving, and the clutch we have on her independence will be released like never before. As much as it scares me, I also know it's a rite of passage—a moment in time I can’t change or control no matter how hard I try.

So instead, I take a back seat for the first time in my life. I hope to be a touchstone for life’s big problems and a safe space to share the things she won’t want to tell our parents. Beyond that, I have to trust that she will fall and get back up just as many times as I did, in every way that’s right for her and her unique journey.

A few days into my interview process, Millie Bobby Brown posted a video to Instagram in response to the media’s coverage of her appearance. Referencing headlines like:

“Why are Gen Zers like Millie Bobby Brown aging so badly?” written by Lydia Hawken.
“What has Millie Bobby Brown done to her face?” written by John Ely.
“Millie Bobby Brown mistaken for someone's mom as she guides younger sister Ava through LA” written by Cassie Carpenter.
“Little Britain's Matt Lucas takes a savage swipe at Millie Bobby Brown's new 'mommy makeover' look” written by Bethan Edwards.

Though the headlines are disappointing, I didn’t find them at all shocking. If I myself had conjured such intense emotions about my little sister growing up, I can’t even begin to imagine the pressure that is felt when you are seen as the whole world’s little sister.

Millie was just 12 years old when the first episode of Stranger Things hit Netflix. Today, she is 20 years old and a happily married woman. Why, as a society, do we feel so much ownership over celebrities' lives, and why do we assume that our opinions about them hold any value or even truth?

As bravely stated by Millie: “We have become a society where it is so much easier to criticize than it is to pay a compliment. Why is it the knee-jerk reaction to say something horrible, rather than just saying something nice? If you have a problem with that—I have to wonder, what is it that makes you so uncomfortable?”

It’s a great question. Why are we so uncomfortable with change? Why do we, even for a second, think that someone else’s life should progress on our terms? And what does this type of pressure do to our sense of self and authority over our own lives?

I sat down with my friend and former roommate, Tallulah Willis, to discuss just that. Tallulah is the daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, similarly to Millie, Tallulah grew up in the public eye from the moment she was born. There has not been a single moment in her life where the world hasn’t had something to say about her. From her birth announcement in PEOPLE magazine to her dinner date at the Chateau just a few days ago, the media has shared their constant stream of thoughts on her life and appearance through countless articles.

To me, Tallulah is simply my whimsical and wacky friend. She is not the daughter of celebrity superstars – rather, they are simply Tallulah’s mom and dad, within the context of my world. But it’s moments like this where the gravity of her never having had a single minute of anonymity hits me, and my heart aches for the little girl that I never knew.

I met Tallulah when I was 20. It was the first year I felt like the world around me truly viewed me as an adult. At the time, like most 20-year-olds, I thought I knew everything and had life all figured out. Little did I know that this assumption would take me on a 7-year cycle of high highs and low lows. Ultimately, I did NOT have it all figured out, and though I didn’t want to admit it, I was nowhere near ready to become a woman at the pace that I did.

I have never felt more like a little girl than the warm August night that I called Tallulah with shaking hands and a cracking voice to let her know that I needed help and a place to go. There was no pause on the other line, just 10 words that changed the trajectory of my life: “Come to my house, stay as long as you need.”

I was supposed to be an adult. In my mind, adults didn’t ask for help. Adults figured their shit out on their own. My problems had become too big for me to face, let alone solve on my own. Over the course of the next year and a half, we would take turns regressing back into girls and helping mother each other into the strong women we are today. Fate happened to align massive life shifts for both of us in perfect timing and I can’t help but think that the roles we have played in each other’s lives were cemented into the universe long before we met.

There is a sweet video of Tallulah at about 10 years old on a red carpet with her dad. He’s being interviewed as she rubs his ears and pats his head, as if blissfully unaware of the lights and cameras pointed at them. It’s hard to believe that this is the same age that Tallulah noted during our interview, feeling the pressures of society to look and act differently. She spoke about the constant aching dialogue around the world’s disappointment that she and her sisters were the spitting images of their father and not their starlet mother.

Tallulah was a part of the first generation of celebrities’ children to feel the outrage that people had for her mere existence, angered by the benefits that came with her inherited “nepotism”. Previous generations had been celebrated, as if the line of Hollywood royalty had been passed down like a queen’s coronation.

Just five years after the video of Tallulah and her dad sweetly smiling ear to ear on the red carpet, Tallulah would become the subject of intense and relentless bullying by the media. We discussed a lot during our interview, but what stood out to me the most was how this painful experience made her incredibly self-aware.

“Because of the particularities of my life, my transition period was super stunted and complex. My maturity developed very quickly in some ways– like with boys and was very underdeveloped in others.”

Tallulah is not naive to the fact that there are many elements to being an adult that she still struggles with – things that other people in their 30s might find to be second nature feel like an uphill battle at times. Simultaneously, there are moments in life that would bring most young adults to their knees that she doesn’t even bat an eye at.

She possesses the type of internal wisdom that allows someone to hold space for their own pain but also extend that same compassion and grace to the very strangers that made her transition so complex and difficult. She articulated that so perfectly through the understanding that though our life experiences may be different, what we feel through them is often the same.

“There will always be duality for everyone, and that’s okay. You will be okay. And the hope is that through it, you can see yourself accurately and accept where you land.”

The circumstances of her larger-than-life upbringing were not something she picked, but rather something she had no other choice but to accept. As I reflected on this thought, it dawned on me that this is the experience of most women. The choice of when to jump into adulthood is actually so rarely made by us, but instead by everyone and anyone else.

I remember a lovely man I dated telling me that this was the last year he had to just enjoy himself. Next year, he would have to “lock in on life.” He was coming up on his “presidential birthday”—thirty-five is when you can officially run for office in the United States. I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t. He said it with so much joy for the period of life he was in.

I, on the other hand, had been “locked in on life” since I was 13 years old. Envy heated me from the inside out, realizing the freedom that comes with being a man is something I would never and could never fully experience. So much seems to happen on their terms and on their timeline, while I have often felt like so much of life is just hurtling at me in lightning speed, and it is simply my job to try to reach out and grab hold for dear life.

Even through my drunken envy, I am reminded that so much has changed in recent history for women, allowing us more freedom than ever before. But then again, there is that word... allowing. Whether it is personally or politically, it feels like so much of life is not a choice that we get to make as women, but like the polarity of fame experienced by Millie and Tallulah, a circumstance that we are expected to just accept.

My mother’s generation was raised by the first wave of women to truly experience any form of meaningful ownership over their self-constitution. Even within that there was a period of time that my own grandmother, despite working at a bank, was not legally allowed to open her own credit card. She had her first child at 23, and by 27, she was a mother to four girls—one of which was my mom, Sue.

I hardly feel ready to be a mom now at 29. The idea that I could currently be raising four girls, largely on my own, feels impossible to even imagine. Motherhood was something not just expected but practically required by my grandmother’s generation. Though I look at my own mother as one of the world’s great treasures, I’m also able to zoom out and see that my mom is also just a girl. I’ve learned to accept her shortcomings and missteps with the understanding that none of us know what we are doing. Her DNA and lived experience were informed by a generation of people who found it normal to become parents while still practically children themselves.

My grandmother was not equipped to be a mother at 23. That’s not to say she didn’t try to the best of her abilities at the time. For all intents and purposes, I can only assume my grandmother had already dug deep to raise herself. Having lived through multiple wars and some of the most challenging times in human history, when it came time to raise her girls, the little girl within her was too exhausted to push forward in a truly meaningful way. So my mom and her sisters were left to largely raise themselves.

During our interview process, my mom told me that she felt as if her parents began to view her as an adult at the age of 12 – the same year they expected her to get her first job. Ironically, this is the same age that I felt like I became an adult, not in my parents’ eyes but in my own.

My mother and I have both been working since we were 12 years old. For me, it was a liberating choice. It’s a very unique and freeing experience to become financially independent at 12 years old. For my mother, it was far from a choice – a cutting short of her childhood that she not only didn’t want, but felt she was nowhere near ready for.

As we continued to talk, I realized that the timeline of my mother’s life and my own seemed to mirror each other – with one huge differentiating factor. For me, these big defining life moments were choices that I often made against my mother’s will. For her, the same moments decades earlier had been experiences that were forced upon her with no other option to choose.

I couldn’t help but wonder if somewhere in my DNA was an intricate code created by my mother's experience, preparing every cell within me for a life similar to hers. Did I boldly and proudly make the same choices that my mother feared, because I had inherited DNA that wanted to protect me from the pain of that disappointment?

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My mom looked so vulnerable lying on the floor of my bedroom with her eyes closed as we talked. She didn’t look at me as we spoke, and I felt tears welling behind my eyes as she told me that the transition into adulthood was something that left her feeling “scared and lost.” Yet she didn’t recall resenting her parents for it at the time.

“I remember being scared and worried a lot, but always having a good time despite that. I didn’t realize that it was wrong until I had my own kids.”

Because my mom and I both found ourselves making adult decisions at such a young age, we couldn't help but laugh while going over the laundry list of bad choices we had made before we had the tools to pick something better.

My mom finally opened her eyes and looked up at me, perched on the bed with my laptop taking notes. She recalled the early days of living on her own, when she completely disregarded any idea of a balanced health and wellness routine. Choosing to purchase a new pair of high heels when she knew it would mean having to live off a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter for the rest of the month.

She had just celebrated her 60th birthday, but when I asked her what her internal age was, she said 26. At that moment, I felt like we were psychically the same age. Sitting in my bedroom yapping with the younger version of my mom, she simply became a woman named Sue instead of “my mom.” She was now someone I could have been best friends with had she not been born 30 years before me.

For some reason, with the scales of time now momentarily being balanced, the gravity of my own life experience seemed to come crashing into the room heavier than ever before. My internal age was certainly not 26. I felt as if I was much older than any age I had physically experienced.

The interview had flipped, and I felt shaky as I told her that until very recently I had felt 50 internally. Listening back to the recorded audio of our conversation, I can detect the nervous laughter that rises to the surface whenever I feel as if I might begin to cry. I lay back on my bed, unable to look at my mom the same way she was unable to look at me while sharing the intimate details of her past. My voice, rhythmic and overflowing:

“I feel like I’m so tired and I’ve been an adult for so much longer than most people. I’ve been taking care of myself for so much longer than most people. Whereas my friends feel like they’re in a phase where they are just now getting going—because it’s just in the past couple of years that they have been financially taking care of themselves—I feel like I’ve been doing this for so long. How am I supposed to keep doing this?”

We both silently pause, realizing that I missed out on what many people consider the best and most fun years of their life. My mom breaks the silence and reminds me that it was against her wishes and protest, that I moved out at just 17 years old. There was no one to tell me no at the time because I was a child who had the income and resources of an adult. I was not moving out to party and explore the chaos of life. I was leaving home and spending a majority of my time traveling alone on work trips. My responsibilities were far too advanced, and I was effortlessly punching well above my weight class.

The room suddenly feels heavy as we talk. Anyone else who walked in wouldn’t be able to detect it, but my mom and I are cut from the same empathetic cloth. My pain is her pain, and her pain is mine. I feel unsettled when my mom is in distress, and I know she feels the same way about me. I can’t help but think she can sense this and momentarily takes over our interview, as if giving me time to disassociate within my own thoughts. Through the hum of my mind, I can hear her reassuring me that it’s never too late to find an appreciation for the stage of life I’m actually in – shedding the baggage of my inner 50-year-old woman to reveal the 20-something girl I actually am.

She isn’t wrong. She rarely is.

I have felt this inner pull to regress back to a childlike state for the past year. I have slowly allowed myself to do so, perhaps at times embarrassing myself in the process. I know I missed out on so much, and I refuse to allow my story to end that way.

I’ve become more free and playful in the past year than I ever have in my life. I recently joined my sister and her friends on a party bus we rented for her sweet sixteen. My sister was gracious enough to let me plan the 16th birthday of my dreams for her. It was the party I wish I had, but was too busy to partake in when the moment actually arrived in the timeline of my own life.

My mom tells me that my sister has privately commented on my self-proclaimed regression. For a moment I worry that I’m being judged, but that feeling is quickly replaced with the pride that I am allowing myself to do what’s best for me, despite what people might think.

I’ve pushed my parents away most of my life, refusing to ask for help. Just now, as I take the final lap of my 20’s, have I started allowing myself to rely on them in big and small ways. Last year after being dumped by my situationship, I called my mom every few hours for weeks – just to talk. My heart was broken, and the only person who could make it better was my mom. Normally I would have self isolated, refusing to let a single soul know that I had allowed someone to get close enough to hurt me. For the rest of my life, I will look back at those weeks as the first moments I allowed myself to drop the mask of adulthood and simply just be whatever I needed to be.

I know my mom had to kiss many frogs herself, and we laugh as I ask her if she remembers the moment men started seeing her as a woman and not a girl. She can’t remember, despite confidently confirming she “turned a lot of heads.” She can, however, distinctly remember the moment that she stopped being noticed by men and “became invisible.”

Anxiety creeps into my bloodstream as she shares this, because I have long feared reaching this moment myself. She reassures me that a different, more authentic experience comes into view as you age. You appreciate and express your love for your girlfriends – who they are, what they wear, their style, their creativity – more than ever before. And it becomes rewarding in an entirely new way to be noticed for who you are, rather than what you look like.

Our conversation flows in a million different directions, and I feel like I learn more about who my mom truly is in an hour than I had in my entire life. As our conversation comes to a close, she imparts some of the most important wisdom on me:

“I’m so glad I was a crazy person in my 20s and early 30s,” she laughs. “Have fun so that you are left with no regrets. You have the rest of your life to make big adult decisions, and though your late 20s may feel like you are nearing the end, you are actually just walking up to the starting line of life. Let yourself remain young and free for as long as possible, because you have that much more life experience to help dictate those big decisions. There is no reason to rush out of one chapter into another.”

We are more equipped to be mothers than ever before. Financial independence and access to higher education have allowed us the growth, time, and tools to be better mothers. Against the dreams and desires of straight, white male conservatives and cosplaying tradwives alike, women are choosing to have children later in life, thanks to modern medicine. This means that we are no longer forced into bearing children while we are still mentally children ourselves.

We are settling less and less in romantic relationships because we have the opportunity and income to wait. This means no longer procreating with men who still act like boys. When both parents are armed with the tools to be forces of positive support in a child’s life, we will see a massive cultural shift. I’m hoping the girls and boys of my sister’s generation will be that change.

While writing this essay, I decided that I needed to sit down with my friend Sara Coates. We related on moments of personal regression in the present day, attempting to relive aspects of a missed youth – because I had jumped and she had been pushed into the sea of womanhood much too soon.

Sara, however, has the added complexity of having recently become a mother herself. I knew the idea of wanting to be a good mom and how she would manage to foster a magical and long childhood for her own daughter, weighed heavily on her mind. Having previously admitted to me that the idea of motherhood felt terrifying at times because she thought she was stunted and frozen at the age when responsibility had been forced upon her.

It began to appear as a common thread among the women in my life – being frozen in time on the inside and hurtling through life on the outside. Never once asking if anyone else around us felt the same way. Self-isolating within our own not-enoughness, because to admit that we felt ill-prepared for whatever stage of life we were in, felt like a failure.

Sara bravely told me that pregnancy felt embarrassing to her—it was a part of womanhood she had never considered being a part of until it happened. Having grown up in a less-than-stereotypical All-American family, and being raised by a mother that was largely isolated from the world, her own transition into womanhood was guided mostly by the families and women she watched on TV.

Watching her with her own daughter today, you wouldn’t know it. Motherhood seems to come easily to Sara. She’s raising one of the happiest little girls I have ever met. Yet she speaks so honestly about what many women dare not admit, out of fear of being judged.

“Motherhood is really, really hard, and it wasn’t this thing I had always dreamed about. I LOVE my daughter, but I didn’t dream of becoming a mother. In fact, I have always felt really uncomfortable with stereotypical ideals of being a woman.”

Her personal marker of womanhood didn’t coincide with motherhood, but rather with the passing around of her school pictures in 9th grade, as classmates commented on her “big boobs” that had appeared over the summer.

“It was a moment where I thought…oh…I’m different now. I’ve changed, and I’m looked at differently now. I loved it. I thought–I’ve finally made it. I had always wanted big boobs. I would lay in the tub and suck my stomach in as a kid so I could pretend that my ribcage was boobs. I always gravitated to hyper-femininity—but not motherhood. I always loved Drag Queens, Pamela Anderson and Playboy… but to be just an actual woman makes me uncomfortable.”

The Quiet Collapse of Girlhood

Why can't society seem to stand women—at any age—and what happens when we start rewriting the rules ourselves?

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