If you really think about it, you could point to the exact moment in time in which everything changed. It was the moment in which your ideas about virtually everything shifted. Adolescence is a disaster that is common among everyone.
For girls especially, adolescence could ostensibly be seen as ruining their lives. In her book, Reviving Ophelia, Dr. Mary Pipher describes this point in life as the moment that girls stop living for themselves and start living for other people.

That argument does hold some weight. In most cases, a young girl, let’s say under 12-years old, does not direct her actions in such a way that she is constantly conscious of how her actions will affect others. She doesn’t say, “I’m not going to play on those monkey bars because that person won’t like it.” She just plays on the monkey bars because that is what she wants to do and that’s the only permission she needs.
Then suddenly everything changes. It’s no longer that important what she wants to do. It is more important that she molds her behavior in a way that will please other people. Most likely those people would be her friends and other peers.
Granted, I’m making a generalization about a large group of people who most likely don’t all behave the same way, although for the most part I do believe that girls undergo very similar changes in thinking when they become adolescents.
So how do we deal with the person that we become during adolescence? It’s not an altogether bad thing to live for other people, but doing things for the betterment of society is much different than doing things simply to gain the affection of peers, which is what is seen with adolescent girls.
Furthermore, this would be a non-issue if it were simply a phase and something which was grown out of in a matter of time.

The crux of the issue is that many girls never leave the adolescent mindset and exhibit it well into adulthood.

Some women never learn that their lives belong to them and not to their peers and certainly not to their partners. That kind of thinking all began with adolescence.
To address this, perhaps we need to start at the issue’s origin. We need to raise our adolescent girls in such a way that they understand that it’s okay for them to be interested in things. There is no need for them to suddenly lose interest in activities that they once found enjoyable and become completely involved in pleasing other people. But how do we do that?
The largest contributing factor to girls losing a sense of self in adolescence is the institution of education.
I am a strong proponent of higher education. It is a process which, if pursued proactively, teaches an individual to observe and think critically; however, as adolescents are attempting to become the more adult version of themselves, they are suddenly thrown into a situation with hundreds of other individuals experiencing the same shift. It almost makes sense to put a large gap between sixth grade and college and just cut-out the middle factor which seems to do nothing but cause people to lose sight of things.

Junior high and high school have very little to do with education and everything to do with losing yourself, which I wouldn’t have a problem with if the loss of self was temporary for all girls or if it was an evolution rather than a downward spiral.

Ideally, compulsory education would be something very different than what it is currently. But as it stands now, our education system is an important part of democracy and not something we can simply eliminate completely. On the other hand, the education institution in America is far from perfect. If we are unable to make immediate changes at the root of the problem, perhaps we need to start by making changes further down the road, in adulthood.
Women need to take the front seat in their lives and remember that it is important not to live only for others. In the end, we all wind up at the same place, demise. So a woman should walk her own path to that end, because it would be useless to walk someone else’s path and then wind up at an end that she doesn’t recognize as her own.