The purpose of this poster session is to examine the interconnected reasons for stress in girls? lives. While much attention has been provided individually to issues such as eating disorders, early sexual activity, alcohol and drug abuse, and a myriad of other health issues, the one underlying theme that connects all these issues is stress. Since the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001, the nation has experienced tremendous amounts of collective stress. Girls are not exempt from these additional stressors. But even prior to the attacks, girls had reported facing negative stressors every day of their lives and becoming overwhelmed by these pressures. The consequences of increased stress are evident by the number of health problems that we are seeing in girls. Although not all young people experience drastic changes the same way, girls are more likely to rate negative life events as more stressful than boys do. A method to help elucidate the numerous stressors girls are facing is a web of causation, which is an epidemiological model based on the principle that the effects of a disease are based on an interrelated chain of events and not one cause. The negative consequences of too much stress can have detrimental effects for girls. In a world where family life, number of activities, media messages, homework loads, peer pressure, environmental dangers, and puberty can become overwhelming, health educators need to be educated on all the reasons that girls are becoming more distressed in life. Without the proper understanding of the chain of events that can cause too much stress, a generation of girls is going to miss the plethora of tools that exist to process and profit from the multitude of changes that naturally occur in adolescence and to deal with the real stresses of living in an uncertain world.