An interview with Patricia Hersch
by Ravi Dykema

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes in the world of teens? Have you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall in an adolescent gathering? Journalist Patricia Hersch did just that, journeying into the tribal community of adolescents to find out what today's kids want and need. Ravi Dykema, publisher of Nexus, interviewed Hersch, author of A Tribe Apart: A Journey _into the Heart of American Adolescence for a glimpse into the secret world of adolescents.

RD: I have noticed-as I am sure most adults who are around teenagers must notice-that teenagers seem as if they're from a foreign country, with a culture I'm unfamiliar with. They seem inscrutable-as if they're putting on a facade and not really showing what they're really feeling.

PH: They seem inscrutable, but in fact most adults don't really try to connect with them. It seems that the parent generation, whether they have young kids or old kids, spends a lot of focus in learning how to deal with little kids. Even when they have nannies, they have the nannies write down when the kid first turns over or what new word they said. And they manage to get over to the toy store to buy the black-and-white discovery toys because they're the right ones. Parents of young children read books on the ages and stages of child development, but they seem to have no awareness that the years of adolescence incorporate the exact same velocity of change that you see from birth through age two. It's the only other stage in the life cycle that incorporates so many changes at every level. 

RD: Those are the years you're calling adolescence?

PH: Adolescence is when they hit middle school until they graduate from high school. Within that period of time, tremendous changes occur, and it's remarkable to me how the same parents who pay such close attention to those early years seem to forget about their kids as they approach adolescence. At adolescence, they breathe a deep sigh of relief, cross their fingers and let the kids go. 

RD: Have parents always done that? 

PH: Let's put it into some kind of historical perspective. The present generation of parents and workers has grown up during a period with such enormous social changes affecting the adult world, that it's still quite self-involved. Men and women are still trying to figure out the roles of men and women, families are still trying to figure out who should do what in the family. And certainly anybody who has a family is trying to figure out the balance between work and family. It's an economic reality in this country that families have to work. We are a working society. It's a reality for economic reasons, and it's a reality for educational reasons. We're not going back to a period that was actually an aberration in American society, where women were solely responsible for children. The '50s and '60s were a blip on the chart of history.

RD: What happened prior to that?

PH: Children were never left on their own. Mothers themselves were not necessarily responsible, but adolescents were more like indentured servants, apprentices working in sweat shops or out in the fields, or they were in the care of an extended family or a boarder in your house who watched the kids for room and board. In the post-war years, many mothers became part of a core of middle-class women who retained their status by not working. They were the moms baking cookies and manning the neighborhoods and overseeing volunteer efforts. Historically, America's children have never ever been left totally alone. Then, in 1972, when the recession hit, it was no longer possible for one person alone to support a family. At the same time, the women's movement was gaining ground. So we became a working society in the '70s. And now, in the year 2000, we still haven't figured out how families and work fit together. We have family leave laws, but nobody considers using them for anybody other than babies. So by the time kids reach 10 or 11, we essentially leave them alone. 

RD: You mean they come home from school and they're home alone? 

PH: It's more than that. They're left without a sense of community. My youngest son, now 19, grew up with both parents at home. However, at early adolescence, he had nobody to play with because all of his friends either were told to stay at home until their parents got home, or they were already responsible for younger siblings. Either way, my child, with these two at-home parents, was as stuck in front of the TV set as every other child in America. Free play is gone for America's children. And just think of all the things kids learn from playing freely-compromise and winning and losing. Now we're canceling recess in school and placing more emphasis on passing standardized tests.
Starting at the developmental ages, when kids require going out among their peers in the world to learn about things, they either can't go out, or they can go out and there are no grown-ups around-and grown-ups serve a very important purpose. They help kids learn about alternatives. Your child says "I'm bored. I'm hungry." You, as a parent, can say, "Gee, have I ever shown you my secret recipe for hot chocolate?" Or the kids are playing outside and they get into a tussle about something, and a grown-up just sticks his or her head out the door and says, "Why don't you guys try to talk it out?" Grown-ups can offer little hints and gentle guidance. When I talk about communities, I'm not talking about the old comedies or shows on television, I'm talking about a world that is peopled with multiple generations that rub elbows against each other, not mentoring in any kind of formal fashion, but just offering that kind of gentle guidance.

Witness to a secret tribe The following is excerpted from A Tribe Apart by Patricia Hersch (Ballantine Books, 1998) I let the kids reveal themselves in their own words...I went back to them again and again to make sure I got it right, each conversation encouraging deeper though on both our parts... I was part of those soap operas that began the first semester I went to school: Where will Joan end up in her desperate search for acceptance?  Will Charles get revenge in lacrosse? Can Jonathan find a meaningful course to pursue after high school? Will Brendon self-destruct from anger, spin out of control, or are his anchors sufficient? I listened and talked but I never told them what to do unless they asked my opinion.  Sometimes they talked just to hear how something sounded out loud.  They were trying to figure out what they thought about themselves.  I was simply a witness.  Sometimes they would act bold when they were scared, act angry when they were hurt, act like they didn't care when they did.  But because I knew and had time, eventually the truth would come out. It was a gut-wrenching, yet exhilarating experience for me.  Adolescents are acutely aware, curious, deeply into the pulse of life.  They need to know so much and earlier than before.  They need to sort out life's complexities.  Yet as they grapple, albeit awkwardly, with the same world that confounds us adults, we want to control delivery of information as if that will stop them from arranging their friend's abortion, having sex, doing drugs, sneaking out in the middle of the night, and do on. As the writing of this book progressed, I read section of chapters, even entire chapters, to some of the kids.  There was always a sense of wonder _ "My God, that is me!  How did you know how I was feeling!  How could I have done that?"  I knew because they told me in words, in actions, in comportment.  Face-to-face over time, it was not so difficult to figure out.

RD: What's different now?

PH: We've left kids without a sense of community. I was interviewing a 15-year-old girl for a story, and I asked her, "What do you do after school?" She said, "I go home and I watch my soaps and I call my friends and maybe do a little homework." And then she took a deep sigh and said, "You know, I guess you could say sometimes it gets lonely." A light bulb went off in my head and I realized that when our children approach adolescence, all we ever think about is whether they're "good" or "bad"-if you leave them alone for a few hours, do they behave? Do they get in any trouble? We forget about all the human emotions. This little girl had been left alone after school since she was 10 years old, and when I spoke to her she was 15. That's a long time. There's a lot of empty space in five years.
The bottom line is that everybody needs a community. Everybody. It's an instinctive human need. We adults now walk around belly-aching about how we wished there was community again, because we have an image in our head about what it is. But kids today have absolutely no image of what it is, because they've never experienced it. Even so, they have that basic primal human need for community. So in the absence of an adult community that embraces them, touches them and guides them, they form their own. And that is where I spent my time-inside that community. 

RD: How did you get involved in their community?

PH: I started by looking at the statistics. Surveys have established the rate of alcohol and drug use among adolescents. If you walk down the halls of any middle school or high school in the United States and pick a random handful of kids, you could look at statistics and know that four of them were having sex and two of them were doing drugs. We were talking about numbers that were quite notable. And it wasn't just guys in trench coats who listen to Goth, or girls with earrings in their tongues. The statistics showed that something was going on in adolescence that we didn't quite get. I wanted to know what those statistics meant. Were the same kids having sex who were drinking? Do they have any relationship to each other? Does purple hair indicate anything at all? 
I really wanted to know what it was to be a regular adolescent, so I went to school every day for a year, middle school and high school. I attended school and chose a group of kids that looked "normal"-kids who seemed to be going to class, doing their work, dressing in ways that weren't bizarre. And that's all I knew about them. I didn't know if they came from dysfunctional families, or if they were survivors of something. I just knew they seemed normal in school. Then I went to their parents and told them "I want to talk to your kids. They seem like such nice, normal kids. I see them in class. They're there all the time." I had a carefully drafted form, and the deal was that when parents signed the form, they agreed not to ask any questions of me. I told them "I can guarantee you I'll find out things that I'd have to ground my own child for, but we really all need to know about adolescence. So I'm not going to tell you if I find out your kids are drinking or something. Obviously, if they're doing something life-threatening, I'll figure out some way to be involved." Every parent signed my form. More surprising was how many parents didn't even bother to meet me. 
I then was off and running. I told any adolescent I ran into, when I was doing other stories or just around the community, that I was writing this book and I needed adolescents to help me draw a map. I asked if they could help, suggest places to go-and where I shouldn't go. They'd say "Go to this McDonald's, not that McDonald's, and if you're at a football game, the middle school kids sit on the left-hand side, and those kids that are walking back and forth the whole game, well, look to the right of them in the back of the bleachers." They were great. Then I began to draw a map and I made an express effort not to bond to adults. When I was in school, no matter how uncomfortable it was, I just stayed by myself until an adolescent came and greeted me and talked to me. Basically I was a fly on the wall. 
I started meeting with the kids, and what was remarkable was even by being in their space at school, I could start a conversation. It wasn't hard. I could say, "God, was that a stupid assembly today or what?" Or "How did you feel about that assignment you got in class?" I didn't try to be one of them-obviously, I can't pass for an adolescent anymore-but I could be among them and talk about things because I'd been there and was interested in their world. Then I started meeting with kids individually. Sometimes they didn't want to meet me alone, so they'd bring a bunch of friends. And other times they would, and I just let it roll. My job was to get to know them, and I had no idea how this was going to work or what I was going to do. I was just learning as I was going along.
So we talked. We started wherever they wanted to. And basically they individualized themselves as human beings. They came from all different sorts of backgrounds. What was important to them varied. But I began to see that the community they had created, this adolescent community in which they moved, touched them all. And that's really key. Eventually, I chose eight kids and balanced the factors-four boys, four girls, four intact families, four families of divorce and so on. Then I followed those kids essentially for five years. 

RD: What did you find?

PH: I found that the adolescent community is like a tribe. It really has a lot of internal structure. It's not a bunch of crazy, wild, impulsive kids acting like jerks. Rather, it's a coherent social structure that is created by people who are at an immature age. In that community, a lot of the behaviors that we are troubled about, they consider normal. You can do drugs or not do drugs, you can drink or not drink. Kids are very non-judgmental of each other's behavior in that sense.
But they all party together, and all the parties eventually happen at empty houses. So you have a situation where the kids who are doing substances are the sole entertainment of the kids who are not doing substances. Any parent who sits on their laurels and feels good about the fact that their kids aren't involved in substances is making a big mistake, because it's a substance-based social life. We adults are looking at the things that freak us out, and then we never get beyond the freak-out. But what's sad-in some ways sadder than the substances themselves-is that kids are growing up not learning how to socialize properly with each other.

RD: What is the most important thing you found? 

PH: Kids can't mature properly unless they have adult voices rolling around in their heads. Then they can add those to the mix and make their own decisions. Maybe adolescents have never listened to everything adults say, but at least they had some adult voices in their heads to provide some kind of guidance. Kids today are in free-fall. There's no agreement in society about values. The house next door may be serving pot and alcohol to kids, while you think that your child shouldn't drink until he or she is 21. It's hard for kids. They tell me they've never seen a happy, working relationship among adults, which is possible these days. So how are they going to be the grown-ups of tomorrow? 

RD: What do you think is the solution?

  We need a social contract among all of the adults of this country. In order to have a capable and competent citizenship base for tomorrow, it's incumbent upon every adult to have a stake in the raising of adolescents until they're 18. That's what a social contract means. It doesn't say only parents have to do it. It's because inherently we have always understood as a nation that adolescents grow up with input from many adults. So we aren't helping anybody by throwing this back to parents who don't have the time. Nor can they do it alone-adolescents need a network of adults. Therein lies the answer, not in more metal detectors in school. If we knew all kids better, we'd have a much better chance to know those kids who are really troubled and who put all of our kids at risk. 
The answer lies in talking to all kids, and having multiple points of awareness of our adolescents. If we rely on schools as the absolute only place where we see kids in any kind of number, we can't know kids. Kids can be totally unknown in school by their peers, and no teacher is ever going to know everything-it's impossible. It used to be that the neighborhood grocer knew us, and the guy who was head of the youth group knew us. So kids were seen in lots of different venues, which rounds out our portrait of adolescent wandering in the world. Nobody wants to hear it because it's too scary, because it's going to take up our time. Now we have on our hands an adolescent culture in which the stars, the kids who are honor roll students and cheerleaders, are just as involved in dangerous behaviors as the "troubled" kids. And it's not good-it's not good for any of them. 
We have to reconnect the adolescent community to ours. It is not so hard. We just need to reach out and embrace them and take the time to get to know them-one by one, as individuals, not a tribe.