(FORTUNE Magazine) – IF GIRLS are tougher and more resilient than boys, as many developmental experts insist, why do they so often seem to plunge deeper into unhappiness when they hit their teens? Adolescence -- no picnic for anyone -- is superficially harder on boys. Young women get raped; young men get killed. Girls attempt suicide more often than boys; boys more often succeed. Says Joy Dryfoos, author of Adolescents at Risk: ''I think we've equalized the misery of growing up.'' But when things go wrong these days, the consequences for girls are often disastrous compared with earlier times, as reflected in rising sexual abuse and widespread teenage pregnancies, alcohol problems, and depression. To some feminists, the answer is easy: When they hit their teens, girls begin to realize that women are not valued in society and grow quietly depressed at the thought of their futures. Maybe, but on the other hand, women have never had more opportunities. Many of the girls FORTUNE talked to for this story had higher aspirations and expectations than boys did. It wasn't the future that was making these girls miserable. It was the present. At the root of much of the pain is lack of parental involvement. In a discussion with four boys and four girls at the Phoenix House drug rehabilitation center in Orange County, California, a reporter asked what one thing they would change about their lives. The boys gave four different replies, but the girls' answers were nearly identical. All yearned for better relationships with their families.

Even in the closest of families, being a teenage girl is scary. As most of them -- and the experts as well -- see it, the clear and present danger is boys. Says Dr. James Garbarino, president of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development in Chicago: ''Sexist attitudes remain a major risk factor for girls. Date rape numbers testify to a climate of coercion.'' Many boys, he adds, feel that if a girl is just seductively dressed, she has lost the right to say no. Don't believe it? Listen to what these 14- and 15-year-old girls, mostly white and lower middle class, had to say about their male peers during a weekly discussion session at the Newport Mesa, California, affiliate of Girls Incorporated -- formerly Girls Clubs of America. ''They pressure you. They get you drunk.'' ''You have to be perfect for them.'' ''They can change you. They get you into drugs.'' ''They keep pushing and pushing. And if you care about them, you'll do anything for them. You want to believe it: Someone loves me.'' The fragile pubescent female psyche takes a further battering from the media. Sex spices everything from rock videos and talk shows to PG-13 movies and fast-food commercials. Veronica C. Garcia, principal of the New Futures School for pregnant and parenting teens in Albuquerque, New Mexico, fumed recently about a Taco Bell commercial that used women in scanty dresses to sell a fajita. Says Garcia: ''We sell kids sex, but then we don't really want to talk to them about it.'' Having been told repeatedly that they're sex objects, girls become even more subject to the usual teen anxieties about appearance. Today's specifications call for blonde and thin -- no easy task, since most girls get bigger during adolescence. Many become anorexics or bulimics; a few rich ones get liposuction. Says Kristen Golden of the Ms. Foundation for Women: ''Suddenly they need diets, even surgery. It's incredible. It's not 'If you study, you can do this.' It's 'If you mutilate yourself, you too can look like this.' We < make their focus pleasing other people and physical beauty.'' Pleasing others often translates into having sex; young teenage girls talk about the subject today with a candor that is mind-boggling even to thirtysomethings. By age 20, according to surveys by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit reproductive health research organization, some 44% of all girls in the U.S., and 63% of black girls, will become pregnant at least once. The institute does not track teen pregnancy rates by income level, but anecdotal evidence indicates that a fair number of white, middle-class, suburban kids are getting pregnant. While the pregnancy rate among sexually active teens is dropping as more use contraceptives, the overall rate has remained constant for the past decade because teens are becoming sexually active at a younger age. Drawing on regular surveys, the Guttmacher Institute reports that in 1982, 19% of unmarried women age 15 had had intercourse; in 1988, the most recent year studied, 27% had. Result: The U.S. has one of the highest birthrates for 15- to 19-year-olds among Western industrialized nations. Other surveys suggest that the rate of HIV-positive infection is growing rapidly among adolescent girls. WHAT can be done? Providing teenage girls and boys with greater information about -- and access to -- birth control would doubtless help: Roughly 80% of all teen pregnancies are unintended, according to experts. Better still to give younger girls the support they need to delay their first sexual experience. In the Will Power/Won't Power component of the Girls Incorporated Preventing Adolescent Pregnancy program, counselors help girls age 12 to 14 who come mainly from low-income families build assertiveness skills so they are able to say no because they don't feel emotionally ready for sex. In role- playing exercises, the girls act out ways of dealing with boys' advances; they also weigh alternatives -- facing, for example, the likelihood that getting pregnant may force them to give up a shot at college. Girls could also benefit from a wider variety of challenges than just the sexual. Says Martha Garcia, who is working with the Ms. Foundation to identify developmental programs available to girls throughout the U.S.: ''The programs that girls like best are those that point to their strengths. It's better to say to a girl, 'You have an incredible talent in art, and we should encourage that,' than to say, 'It's a sin to have sex, and that's it.' '' In other words, let's start giving girls something to compete for besides boys. The boys, after all, grow up playing football, basketball, or baseball. For girls, boys too often tend to be the only prize. Says Jennifer Martinson, a 16-year-old mother of two sons in Minneapolis: ''The schools need to give girls more opportunities that boys get. Like more sports -- you don't see as much publicity for girls' softball and basketball as you see for the boys. If you put more focus on girls, more people would get interested in it.'' A Girls Incorporated program called Stepping Stones teaches young girls correct ways to jump, throw a ball, and use the body, so that by the time they are 10 they haven't been subjected to five years of the dreaded pronouncement, ''You throw like a girl.'' The organization is developing another program to help them build team play and risk-taking skills. Education can make a big difference -- especially among the poor, who are less likely to get good schooling. According to the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, teen girls who are poor and have below-average basic skills are 5 1/2 times more likely to have children than nonpoor ones with average or better skills. Once these kids become mothers, catching up gets even harder. Nearly three-fourths of teen mothers 17 and under don't finish school. Martinson, whose father left when she was 8 and whose mother ''was off in her own little world,'' is a living testimony to such statistics. Unable to cope after the birth of her second son, she dropped out of school and had no plans to return until she heard about New Vistas, a school for teenage mothers that operates on the first floor of Honeywell's headquarters in Minneapolis and is partly funded by the state. The creation of Honeywell CEO James Renier, who frequently pops in on the classes, the school offers a standard high school curriculum. It starts with breakfast for the mothers and their kids, and provides on-site day care along with health and social services. Martinson, who will be a senior this year, now plans to go to college and become a teacher. Without New Vistas? Says she: ''Welfare for the rest of my life.'' Feminist scholars have begun to argue that conventional schooling itself contributes to the vulnerability of girls. In a controversial report released in February, ''How Schools Shortchange Girls,'' the American Association of University Women charged that girls come out of school ill-prepared to get ahead in society. Among the AAUW's complaints: Teachers pay less attention to girls than boys; some standardized tests remain biased against girls, hurting their chances of getting scholarships and getting into college; many textbooks ignore or stereotype women; and because of discrimination, girls lag behind boys in math and science and thus don't pursue careers in those fields. The study, a synthesis of more than 1,000 publications about girls and education, is easy to criticize. As the authors admit, girls generally get better grades than boys, and a higher percentage go on to college. Says education writer Rita Kramer, author of Ed School Follies: ''The study is a terrible red herring, and it's destructive. The problem is, we're shortchanging all our kids.'' Virtually every teenager interviewed for this article saw school as a solution rather than a problem. They blamed parents and peers, not teachers, for the pressures and lack of support they felt. Nor is bias necessarily the reason more girls don't go into math and science. Says Mary Williams-Norton, chair of the physics department at Ripon College in Wisconsin: ''When I ask children to draw a scientist, they draw a person with wild hair in a white coat and stuff fuming out of beakers. The impression is that science is something you do by yourself, and you have to be a little nuts.'' To counter this notion, Williams-Norton participates in a program called Visit -- Visitors in Science Investigating Together -- sponsored by a committee of Wisconsin elementary science teachers. Visit brings scientists into the classroom to work with kids and show them that science is part of everyday life, done by everyday people. Says Williams- Norton: ''I'll talk to kids about my family and children, so girls don't grow up with the impression that to be a scientist you have to forget being a human being. Every experience that goes against this subconscious stereotype is a help.'' The AAUW study does raise an important issue. Girls may be getting better grades, says Wellesley researcher Susan Bailey, who headed the study, but they aren't getting better jobs because the schools aren't pushing them to develop the skills they'll need to effectively compete in the workplace. Among those skills: the ability to take independent positions and to speak out. (She adds that boys need to learn how to listen more.) On this point, Williams-Norton agrees. Says she: ''Often girls' higher grades are based on low-level stuff, like memorization of fact. One reason that girls don't achieve more later on is that they don't get praised for independent thought, creativity, and higher-order thinking. So they don't think they can do it.'' Are all-girl schools the answer? The verdict is unclear at best. Graduates of women's colleges make up a disproportionate number of the women in Congress and on FORTUNE 500 industrial and service company boards. Critics counter that most girls who attend single-sex schools are just putting off the day they will have to compete with boys in the real world. ONE FACT nobody disputes: Many of the challenges girls face, from peer pressure and twisted cultural messages to wrongheaded classroom training -- can be mitigated by the presence of caring, trusted adults who believe in them. For many -- especially those without families or with families who don't know how to care -- mentors can help. In Los Angeles a program called Moste (Motivating Our Students Through Experience) pairs up eighth- and ninth- grade girls, mostly from poor and minority households, with successful local businesswomen. These women work on building the girls' self-esteem, exposing them to a world they otherwise couldn't know. Moste also sponsors monthly programs in the schools on topics ranging from career strategy to etiquette. Olga Romero, a 15-year-old Hispanic living in South Central Los Angeles, says her mentor, Marilynn Boyko, has made a big difference in her life. Boyko, a gregarious woman who runs her own special-events business, takes Olga to museums, movies, and fancy restaurants. Says Olga: ''That's nice, since I'm used to Jack-in-the-Box and McDonald's. They brought me all these forks and spoons, and I didn't know how to eat. So I said, 'How do you eat this?' Marilynn taught me how to dress for the occasion, to put the napkin on my lap. I didn't know that. I've never done that before.''

Better yet, Olga, whose grade point average rose from 1.2 to 3.5 during the past year, now plans to go to college and pursue a career. That's a change. Says she: ''I wanted to get married at 16. Now I don't. I see all these ladies in Moste who can do anything they want because they aren't married and they have careers. I said, 'I want to be like them. I want to have a career, and then I can get married and have kids.' '' The only drawback to the program, Olga says, is that there isn't one for boys.