The Next Feminist Revolution : Today’s adolescent girls face all the freedoms their mothers won, plus all the expectations their mothers ignored.

With her weekly allowance, my 12-year-old daughter buys teen magazines. “Your prom! Your dress! Your thighs! All your problems solved!” the spring headlines shriek. “Look, Mom, this issue is perfect for me,” Samantha says, though the prom is years away. Poring over the glossies, she stares up into her mirror. “My mouth is too small,” she’ll frown. Or, “Does my head dip in in the back?”

Has it all come back to this? Superficially, the lives of 12-year-old girls today appear to revolve, much as mine did a generation ago, around lipstick and nail polish, paper-thin 16-year-old movie stars (in my case Jimmy Darren, in hers “Seaquest” star Jonathan Brandis) and the thrills coming from hearing female singers wax on about love (for my era’s “Going to the Chapel” my daughter substitutes rap group Salt-N-Pepa singing “OK, what’s my weakness? Men. OK, then chill it, chill it” on MTV.)

But if it looks like only more of the same (with time out for softball and track), growing up today is a much riskier proposition. There are other signs--in the obsession with weight loss, the idealization of the fashion-model subculture, the high rate of teen pregnancy and incidence of suicide--that we are a long way from “The Brady Bunch.”

In many ways, girls’ lives now reflect the unfinished business of their parents, a generation born to believe that life had no limits but now learning that it does. We’ve bequeathed to them a cultural revolution, but largely let it go at that. Perhaps this is why parents feel guilty as evidence piles up as to how badly our young girls are doing. While others are free to debate whether feminism has gone too far in its obsession with sexual harassment and date rape, most mothers and fathers I know suspect that the problem with the movement is that it has not gone far enough in helping to pass on strong values to children in a world bereft of them. Moreover, adolescence, a time when ego and selfhood are notoriously weak, may in fact be more treacherous for our daughters born into post-feminist families where “leadership,” “competence” and “assertiveness” are arbiters of female success.

The sixth-grade English teacher at my daughter’s school, known as “a womanist” for pushing her girls into early political consciousness, speaks eloquently of our daughters’ urgency. “It’s worse now than when we were young,” she told me. “In the ‘60s, we girls at least had hope. We sensed our mothers’ frustrations and vowed to live the lives they wanted but never knew. But this generation of teens, the world says they have so many choices, but it still wants them just to be cute. Some of them give up even without trying.”

She’s speaking from what I’ve come to think of as Carol Gilligan territory. The Harvard psychologist’s 1992 study of young girls, “Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development,” documented their painful slide from the heights of “Sure I can” into the valley of “I don’t know.” When Samantha was younger, I, like many women who benefited from the feminist revolution, felt confident that our daughters would fit into their world’s new freedoms with confidence, needing little tailoring for their own needs. But now I’m witnessing firsthand my daughter’s battle against the “psychological foot-binding” that Gilligan suggests few girls can avoid. Like many parents, I cry out: What can I do?

But new ideas are at hand. Already, a movement is starting to guide parents through their daughters’ trying years. Each day brings more books and studies examining “how American schools shortchange girls,” and offering prescriptive advice on how “the mother-daughter revolution” might rectify the situation. (Fathers’ contributions are still undervalued.) There are new classes on “parenting for professionals,” providing guidelines so that children in two-career and single-parent families don’t get shortchanged. And, crucially, there is Thursday, the second annual “Take Our Daughters to Work Day,” sponsored by the Ms. Foundation for Women to help daughters see their mothers’ and fathers’ daily contributions to society.

This increased focus on our children’s real lives, as opposed to our expectations and projections for them, is the unfinished business of the feminist movement. It couldn’t come at a better time.