A tribe apart

Group, Jul/Aug 1998

Most teenagers are fundamentally desperate for adult contact So says journalist and mother Patricia Hersch in her new book A Tribe Apart. "The most stunning change for adolescents today is their aloneness," writes Hersch. "The adolescents of the nineties are more isolated and more unsupervised than other generations."

Hersch injected herself into the lives of eight Virginia teenagers-from class presidents to drug dealers-for three years. That experience led to this summation: "America's own adolescents have become strangers. They are a tribe apart, remote, mysterious, vaguely threatening . . . The individual child feels lost to a world of teens, viewed mostly in the aggregate, notorious from what they do wrong, judged for their inadequacies known by labels and statistics that frighten and put off adults.

In her review of the book in USA Today, writer Deirdre Donahue observes: "The usual suspects cited in the mediaevil rock lyrics, sexually provocative TV shows, easy classes-seem to be far weaker influences on children than overwhelmed, overworked parents who arrive home at 6 p.m., exhausted from the commute and office politics."