What young people need most as they approach adulthood is a rite of passage that makes them feel included. What they get, instead, is prom night -- a ritual of exclusion. For an immigrant mother of three daughters, prom night is the very opposite of the kind of experience she wants her children to have. PNS commentator Neera Sohoni is a freelance writer and an affiliated scholar at Stanford University's Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

PALO ALTO -- One of the most incomprehensible American customs I have encountered as an immigrant mother of three teen girls is the prom. What does the term mean? Is it short for promenade? Why is it so central to young people's lives -- often dwarfing graduation if you measure the time and money families invest in it?

Having sounded out a dozen youngsters and adults, what I've learned is that every year hoards of girls and boys -- far from having fun -- suffer in silence because they either don't make it to the prom or don't make it with the person of their choice.

Boys I know confide that their anxiety level goes way up at prom time. But the stresses of prom night on girls are better known because girls are more likely to articulate them. They worry aloud about whether they will be asked and who will ask them, what to wear, how they will look, whether the date will bring orchids or pay for dinner at a multi-star restaurant. Then there are the worries they don't articulate. My daughter rates the significance of prom night, on a scale of one to ten, at three. But she as well as I know that she is being less than truthful.

The hurt of not going to the prom can last well beyond adolescence. A friend now in her thirties confirms how the memory of missing out still rankles. And what of the boy she declined to go with mainly because he did not fit her standards of physical attractiveness? Does he still smart over that moment when he realized she thought him too fat or ugly?

The media play up prom time as a peak fashion season -- one that turns girls prematurely and magically into grown women. Newspapers tease out the image of "the fashionable prom date" and describe shopping for the prom as "serious business -- after all, it's a chance to look grown-up!" Slinky, satin-clad girls with off-the-shoulder gowns and guys entrapped in somber rented tuxedos fit nobody's idea of the "creative look." Limousines cruise through our suburban neighborhood delivering kids to ballrooms where they will spend the evening standing around stiffly or boisterously celebrating this rite of passage. Yet year after year, thousands of youngsters bet their happiness -- and their parents' pocketbooks -- on a few hours of parodying the glamour of adulthood.

Listening to my daughters talk about the prom is the only time I want to shake them and tell them to get a grip on themselves. Dates and parties are fine as long as they are part of the everyday intercourse of friendship. When the prom turns into a ritual of exclusion, of identifying a privileged class, it becomes dispensable.

In India when I was sixteen, I vowed that no one on this earth would make me undergo the ritual of bride scrutiny by a prospective bridegroom and in-laws. Why should I subject my daughters to the equally probing judgments of the prom in the supposedly more egalitarian setting of the United States?

I know that some young people and their families take great pride in the prom as a coming-of-age ceremony. Countless mantelpieces are adorned with framed photos of the daughter with her first boyfriend at the prom. And looking at students normally at pains to appear casual dressed to the nines and feeling good about it can be therapeutic for many parents.

For me, the prom contradicts everything I want my children to experience at such a celebrated rite of passage -- the anticipation of life's joys, the communal assurance they matter. For too many kids it's just another source of humiliation reminding them that they don't fit in.

This spring as prom night approaches, I can't help thinking it's one trauma our already stressed-out adolescents could do without.