Excerpt: 'Taking Care of Your Girls'

Sept. 3, 2008 — -- Growing up can be hard. One of the most difficult parts is taking care of a changing body.

Dr. Marisa Weiss and Isabel Friedman want to help girls get through it and wrote "Taking Care of Your Girls," a "health guide" for growing girls.

Read an excerpt from the book below, and also read other excerpts featured on "Good Morning America" by clicking here.

Isabel's Take: From Me to You

It's not easy to talk to anyone about the changes your body is going through—especially the private changes. You want to know everything but you don't want to feel uncomfortable learning about it. So how do you get answers to your questions? How do you find the reassurance that everything is going okay and figure out what to expect next? This can all happen in a bunch of ways. Someone in your family might take you aside for "a talk." You might learn some of the things at school or from friends. A book might show up in your room that has a lot of answers (like this one). Or maybe you'll see something in a magazine or on TV. For me things were a little different. I grew up in a unique household. I'm not saying puberty wasn't a confusing time for me, because it was. But because both my parents are doctors (as are three of my grandparents), medical information has always been easy to get. I never had "the talk" because I heard talk about bodies all the time. I also have a very close and open relationship with my cousins and aunts of my mom's side of the family. Dinner conversations quickly get carried away, and we share lots of funny and embarrassing stories.

Years before my own breasts even started to develop, my mom and aunts would tell stories and pass down wisdom from their own experiences. Once my aunt Alice told my cousin Lena, eight, and me, ten, that when she was my age, she felt a bump in her breast. Worried that it might be breast cancer, Alice ran downstairs to tell her mother. Her mom—my grandmother—assured a panicked Alice that it was not breast cancer at all, but that her breast buds were starting to grow!

We all got a good laugh out of the story, but I had another feeling: huge relief! I'd had the same breast cancer scare with my breast bud as Aunt Alice did. That night, Lena and I stayed up late and talked and she said she had been scared too. Even two girls from a family of doctors could freak out about these big changes! From that point on, I knew how important it was to learn about what was going on with my own body; I did not want to be scared every time I noticed a change.