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An interview with Patricia Hersch: A tribe apart
Group, Sep/Oct 2001 by Lawrence, Rick
Irrelevance is the kiss of death for your ministry-- so what will it take to build real relationships with your teenagers? We talk to the best-selling author of A Tribe Apart, a stunning expedition into the secret lives of teenagers.
In our opinion, the best book on the forces shaping today's American adolescents is A Tribe Apart: A Journey Into the Heart of American Adolescence1, written over a six-year period by social researcher and writer Patricia Hersch2 and published in 1999. In an effort to uncover the "secret lives of teenagers," Hersch spent three years following around junior and senior higher-at home, school, work, and play. The book is a blistering and heart-wrenching account of the damage kids have endured at tie hands of a culture that has often abandoned them.
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group executive editor Rick Lawrence talked with Hersch at her home in Reston, Virginia.
group: What led to you picking adolescents as a focus for your research and writing?
Patricia Hersch: When I got pregnant with our first child, my husband and I moved back to Washington, D.C., from San Francisco. Several months after Michael was born, my sister was killed in a car crash. I'm one of three girls. And that was a life-changing event for me. I was experiencing a double trauma-I lost a sister, but I also felt what it was for my parents to lose a child. That made me realize that there was no way we wanted somebody else to raise our child.
This was not a moral decision. The fact is, for all the responsibility involved in raising kids, what work is more satisfying than being around kids that are a part of you? I was very fortunate being a writer. I had the kind of career that I could meld around my family. But it wasn't easy. I basically got up at 4:30 or 5 in the morning to write and then stayed up until 11 or 11:30 at night to be with my husband. I sacrificed sleep all those years in order to try to have both worlds. I also understood that to be trying to work at full-tilt when the kids came home also was of no great benefit to anybody because I would just be in a bad mood. So I wrote around the kids.
When my youngest son went to school, my oldest son was an adolescent. At that point I began to realize that the world was quite different than the one my parents lived in. Our [Boomer] generation of adults have spent their entire lives trying to adjust to a world of changing rules. Mostly the life of this country has been marked by generations marching through time together. But our generation has been very much out of sync, not only with each other, but in a world where the rules between men and women have been totally rewritten, and we haven't quite figured out how to sort that out yet.
Look at divorce and remarriage. The latest figures3 say that there are more intact families-by a few percentage points. Meanwhile, the not-intact families are even more confused than ever before. I've talked to kids who get absolutely baffled trying to explain who's who in their family. I just talked to a former editor of mine who's been divorced twice. He had a child by his second [wife] and had to change the care form at nursery school for than child-he had to change 11 names! That's the kind of complexity I'm talking about.
Well, when Michael was an adolescent I decided it was time for me to start writing about the kinds of things that I really cared about. I had one of those "aha" moments. I said "Here I am sitting in Reston, in this family town, with no [par ents] here all day long. I have this great background in studying cultures. Why don't I do the looking and thinking and the observation for all of the people like me who aren't here?" So when Michael became an adolescent, I started writing about adolescents because he was my first and parenting a teenager wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.
I also became aware that there seemed to be some cracks in the fabric of society that more kids were falling through. And I didn't know if it was because I was just looking around for the first time or if, in fact, things weren't going so well. And that's when I thought of this notion: Could adolescents be symptom-bearers for society's rule-changing uncertainty? All I knew was that maybe the ground needed to be firmer for adolescents. And because it wasn't, more adolescents were having problems.
It began to bother me that kids were alone so much and that adults were gone so much and seemed distracted-- they just had so many things on their minds because there was nothing you could really take for granted. It felt as if families were absorbing much of the reverberations of the rapid social changes of the '60s and '70s, with little support.
group: We're used to hearing this message from conservative politicians, but we're not used to hearing it from somebody who married a Peace Corps volunteer and worked for Head Start. That's what makes what you've discovered so unusual. In your book, I sensed that passion-your filters came through. But I also sensed a sort of indignation....
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