The Secret School Life of Adolescents

Excerpted from And Words Can Hurt Forever: How to Protect Adolescents from Bullying, Harassment, and Emotional Violence

Over and over again parents are surprised, even stunned, to discover the extent and nature of the emotional and physical violence that their teenagers face at school. Have parents been blind to the reality right under their noses, or are they in a state of denial? The more likely explanation is that teenagers and their parents live in different worlds. Jason, who is fifteen years old, attends a large suburban high school in New York. He has a small group of friends who, like him, are in the band. He is not the kind of kid who gets into trouble at school or at home. He believes in "minding my own business" and still does not understand why he was singled out at school. He described his sense of surprise and helplessness this way:

When I was a freshman, I was attacked by four guys at school. I was coming back from band practice, and they dragged me into the boys' restroom and beat me up. I never knew why. No, I never told my parents about it. What for? There was nothing they could do about it. There's nothing anybody can do about it.

We have heard many other teens talk with the same level of conviction that there is nothing that they or anyone else can do to change their circumstances during the school day. They just have to figure out how to "take it." This resignation breeds silence, and the students' conviction is reinforced by the rest of the players in the system. For example, as parents, when our daughters come home and tell us that the boys are chasing them on the playground or teasing them with sexual remarks, we might respond with, "Well, they're just doing that because they like you."

While this may be true in some instances, it is not enough of a response to help. We need to say more. We need to give girls strategies for thinking through what to do and how to do it. For many of them, every day that they feel tormented by this kind of bullying, their self-esteem is slipping, and their feelings of helplessness are growing. Boys, too, are the recipients of this kind of harassment, particularly those who are smaller, slighter, and gentler than the typical masculine norm.

Teachers and other adults often ignore this kind of "play" between teenagers in the mistaken belief that kids have to figure out how to handle these kinds of interactions for themselves. Some pediatricians have supported this approach, advising parents to allow siblings to work out their rivalries without any intervention. The problem with this philosophy is that the solutions children come up with on their own are not always healthy, and often lead to escalating conflict rather than its resolution.

For some children, of course, the solutions turn out to be good and adequate and healthy. They learn how to stand up for themselves. They learn assertiveness. But often we fail to see the full scope and impact of these solutions immediately, if we ever see them at all. For many children, the "solutions" to being harassed, bullied, and tormented can include becoming a bully in response, staying in the building during recess, feeling "sick" at recess or during gym class, joining a group that is "tough" ("my homies") for defense, and beginning to use some sort of drug (whether cigarettes, alcohol, or pot) to try to dull the pain they experience.

With these attempted solutions come many future repercussions. Instead of a secure child, we see a child who shuns activities that we consider good and wholesome. We see children who are no longer sure of themselves, and we attribute this to "normal adolescence." We see a child who is full of rage at home or seems depressed, and again, we think, "This is how it is to be a teenager, isn't it?"

The sources of anxiety and fear for children are not obvious to adults, and parents are often shocked to find out what their kids have been going through at school. Survey research we conducted with college students revealed that many of them felt threatened when they were attending high school but never told their parents. For example, 51 percent of the males said that while they were in high school they were afraid of people at school, and 46 percent say their parents never knew this.

Most parents are unaware of the fact that in confidential surveys, kids say the rides to and from school on the bus are often the periods of greatest vulnerability for them. Why don't parents know? How can they know more? In this chapter we explore the impediments parents and other adults face in trying to understand their kids' day-to-day life in high school. We offer some suggestions on how to break through the domains of silence and misinformation between kids and parents.

Parallel Lives

Journalist Patricia Hersch spent six years doing research for a book about teenagers called A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence. What did she learn? "Today's teens are a tribe apart. The most striking characteristic of many adolescents today is their aloneness....I've learned how much their world eludes us adults — not necessarily because they are rebelling or evading us but because we are not part of it....That freedom changes everything for kids."

She concludes: "There have always been troubled kids, but today their increased isolation allows pressures to build up with no release, no guidance. There is often little monitoring of how adolescents spend their time, whether it be on the Internet, with video games, music, building bombs, or doing their homework." This isolation is the foundation for the secret life of teenagers, a life most teens experience in common ways but taking its darkest form in the life and death of a boy like Dylan Klebold.

There are millions of kids around the country who are alienated, who feel like outcasts, who echo the nineteen-year-old boy quoted in Mark Jacobson's May 17, 1999, New York magazine article about teenagers' reactions to the Columbine shootings: "To be honest, when I first heard about it, part of me feels like, 'Yay!' This is what every outcast kid has been dreaming about doing since freshman year."

Ask almost any adult this question: "Did your parents know about everything you did when you were a teenager that was dangerous, illegal, or dishonest?" For most of us the answer is a resounding no. To test this out, we did a survey of undergraduate students at Cornell University enrolled in a course in human development. The results indicate that many of the respondents had some secret life of which their parents were unaware. Even among this sample of particularly successful and well-behaved adolescents and young adults, there were many with substantial dark secrets. Here are some sample responses when asked to describe the "worst thing, in the sense of most dangerous or troubling" that they had done or considered doing as a teenager in high school that "your parents never found out about":

I thought a lot about death. I thought about suicide, but after much thought I decided that was morally wrong and I couldn't do it, even if I really wanted to. I often prayed that perhaps I'd be in an accident or something similar so that way I could escape from my abusive father.

I was involved in a situation over a girl that escalated to the point that myself and my best friend were threatened with being shot by a guy who had an interest in this girl.

I drank almost every weekend of my senior year in high school, and my parents had no idea. On one occasion I almost died due to my impaired judgment. I was so drunk I jumped on the front end of a car full of my friends, and the car drove off down the bumpy road. After a while I slid off the front of the car and landed in front on the wheels. I heard the brakes squeal, and when the car stopped the right tire was flush against my ribs. I couldn't even get up until the car rolled back because my sweater was still caught under the wheel.

There are too many for there to be a "worst." I had unprotected sex with my boyfriend when I was fourteen and thought I was pregnant when my period was late. I was seriously depressed and contemplated suicide. I hung out with drug dealers.

A group of us broke into an old school during one winter on weekends so we could have keg parties. We vandalized the school and tore up countless records and important documents that were being stored there. Eventually the police found out, but my parents never did.

I seriously contemplated suicide for most of my high school years. Also, I often cut and hurt myself during high school as a way to transfer the emotional pain to physical pain, and probably also as an attempt to get their attention from the scars and bruises. They never noticed.

I considered suicide in high school. My parents never knew. I was diagnosed as manic-depressive my senior year of high school, which had manifested itself through an eating disorder. In retrospect, I can see that my bipolar disorder had been building since approximately twelve years of age. I was very smart and knew that there was something abnormal in my behavior. I used my intelligence to hide it.

These are academically successful young people, responsible and bright enough to succeed in a prestigious elite university, and majoring in human development. If these students have secret lives, then what could we expect of less able, less responsible, more troubled kids? In her work as a therapist, Ellen has heard and seen this firsthand over and over again. Kids and parents sometimes live in parallel worlds, with parents unaware of what their children face at school or what their children are doing to compensate for the pain they are experiencing.

Why Don't Parents Know?

Swedish psychologists Margaret Kerr and Hakan Stattin shed light on the process underlying teenagers' secret lives in a report entitled "What Parents Know, How They Know It, and Several Forms of Adolescent Adjustment." Kerr and Stattin studied over a thousand fourteen-year-olds and their parents. They found that the more parents knew about what their kids did, the better adjusted those kids were — less delinquency, fewer school problems, less depression, more positive expectations of life, more positive peers, and better relations with parents. It sounds like an endorsement of the popular belief that parents who monitor have better kids. However, that is not the whole story.

Kerr and Stattin learned that the spontaneous disclosure of information by children explained more of what was happening than the efforts of parents to track and monitor their kids. The better-adjusted kids simply told their parents what they were doing more often than the less well-adjusted kids. The authors conclude, "There is no direct evidence, then, to link parents' tracking efforts with good adolescent adjustment in a broad, general way." What does all this mean? Kerr and Stattin report that kids who feel that their parents are trying to control them have worse adjustment than kids who feel their parents trust them. Remember that this is a study of fourteen-year-olds. By that age, parents and kids have developed a lot of momentum; there is a history to their relations. Some kids have established a momentum of positive behavior, and their parents rightfully trust them, and so these kids freely disclose what they are doing. Other kids have established a pattern of negative behavior, and their parents rightfully are suspicious (and seek to monitor these out-of-control kids).

For the most part, adolescence is the culmination of childhood patterns, not some dramatically discrepant period of life with little relation to what has gone before. This provides a sensible context for understanding Kerr and Stattin's conclusion: "It would be a mistake to conclude, however, that child disclosure is something completely separate from anything parents do, because parents' actions probably play a role in a child's willingness to disclose. How parents have reacted to information in the past and how accepting and warm they are, in general, are likely to influence disclosure....Parents' past solicitation efforts could influence child disclosure by encouraging the child to develop a habit of disclosing. Very young children could begin talking to parents about their daily activities because the parents ask and listen with interest, and this could become habitual until the disclosure is independent of parents' asking." As always, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Another vital reason that adults do not know some of the secret parts of their children's lives has nothing to do with purposefully keeping adults in the dark. It has to do with teenagers themselves not naming what is happening to them. Because the everyday environment of adolescents is filled with gossip, name-calling, and several forms of harassment, it is often difficult for them to pinpoint which behaviors go over the line into the unacceptable, which behaviors have created the bad feelings they are experiencing. Therapists and other interventionists believe you have to be able to identify or name something for what it is before you can adequately deal with it. If adults fail to react to situations where one kid is emotionally abusing another, it is nearly impossible for kids to label that behavior as abusive. It becomes the norm. Kids, like adults, do not come home and report what they see as mundane or usual. This is true even for kids with the most receptive parents.

Why Can't Parents Discover the Secret Life?

Why is it hard for parents to discover the secret life of their teenager? Like all the tough questions, this one has many answers. For one thing, most parents have a concept of who their child is, and it is difficult to receive information which contradicts that concept. In a sense, it seems disloyal to be capable of thinking the worst of your child. Parental love is strong — and sometimes blind.

Second, parents don't have all the information that they need to draw accurate conclusions. Some of this is because they have no connection with people outside the family who know their child, or because others deliberately withhold information about the child. At times it is because the behavior of children and teenagers differs from setting to setting. Oftentimes, as we mentioned before, it is because children believe that there is nothing their parents can do with the information anyway.

Most of us think kids have one identity, but actually they may have several. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error — the tendency to focus on one set of behaviors in one situation and naively assume that this one pattern is the sum total of that person. Different settings and contexts evoke different patterns of behavior in the same person, even if he or she is a child. At the "normal" end of the continuum, many kids have somewhat different personalities at home and at school, for example. A shy, polite child at home may be boisterous and loud at school. At the "abnormal" end, some kids actually are different people in the two settings. This is often the case with kids who are so deeply troubled that they are en route to being psychopaths (like the proverbial "nice guy" who turns out to be a mass murderer).

And, of course, some kids deliberately set out to deceive their parents. They create secret lives at home and at school in order to hide their experiences on the dark side of the culture. Writing in Time magazine in May 1999, columnist Amy Dickenson put it this way: "Teenagers are good at hiding their true selves — or the selves they're trying out this month — behind the 'grandma face' they wear when they're trotted out to see the relatives. Behind that pleasant mask there can be volumes of bad poetry, body piercing, and tattoos." But this too is not confined to children and youth. Adults sometimes have dark secret lives that they fiercely work to keep private for fear that disclosure will open them to ridicule or legal sanctions.

A word of caution is important here. While it is true that adolescents can have a secret school life (and want to keep it secret due to their growing sense of a right to privacy, feelings of shame, or feelings of helplessness) it is a mistake to conclude that most kids are involved in serious patterns of bad or shameful behavior. Unfounded accusations impede future communication, so get the facts before you say anything, and be careful about coming down too hard on kids. Rather, seek to keep the lines open and find out what you need to know.

What is true is that kids keep secrets or perhaps better put, kids don't share information with their parents or other adults, about their school day for many reasons. It is our job to provide room and opportunity for kids to fill in the blanks for us.

Yet another issue in understanding the secret lives of teenagers is the way kids and their parents differ in their interpretation of family events and history. Tough as it is for us as parents to see the world through the eyes of our children, we must do so. Too many families get caught up in denial and distortion of family events as a way to save face or avoid conflict, only to find that in the long run any short-term gains are washed away by the costs of secrecy.

The Impact of Emotional Violence on "Average" Kids

What happens to kids who get harassed or threatened? What are some of the consequences of bullying and emotional violence? While we are beginning to understand that chronic harassment can lead some children to commit serious acts of violence in retaliation toward others or to gain relief for themselves, most adults are not aware of the consequences for their children — the ones who don't act in a violent manner. In Lost Boys, Jim wrote about boys who turn violent to deal with the problems they encounter. But how do "average" kids contend with the obstacles they face every day at school?