Teens' code of silence keeps them from signaling trouble
Because they might be wrong. Because they don't want to be a snitch. Because they worry about being ostracized. Because they fear retaliation. Because there's no one to trust. Because it's nobody's business.
There are dozens of reasons why teenagers might not tell an adult about a classmate's unusual behavior. Mostly it boils down to human nature, adolescent development, and the ego-centric and survival instincts that are rooted in experience and current events. If a teenager told her father that a friend was drinking and it got the friend in trouble, she probably wouldn't go to him again. Or, just as likely, she might reason that adults already know about the drinking.
Adults apparently didn't know that students at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School thought 16-year-old John Odgren might be capable of violence. Odgren is accused of stabbing 15-year-old James F. Alenson to death in a school bathroom. Many schoolmates had heard Odgren talk about violence but did not tell adults.
Teenagers are confronted almost daily with complicated moral and ethical issues, more than parents may realize, according to professionals. But teens may not be emotionally intelligent enough to deal with them. Which is why silence is their worst enemy.
"This is all about communication," says William Damon , director of the Stanford University Center on Adolescence and a specialist in moral development. "It's not a complicated concept, but it's astonishing how rare it is in our society."
Damon is often called in to help communities after traumas. In 1999 he spent a week in Littleton, Colo., after the Columbine shootings. "In every situation I've seen, there's a lack of communication, no way for someone to share their hopes and aspirations on the positive side, or their worries and troubles on the negative." This kind of sharing isn't something that happens overnight or only after a crisis, he says, but gradually, in public and private forums, large and small, with parents, teachers and students.
Lincoln-Sudbury principal John M. Ritchie has said he's considering establishing a hotline on which students can leave anonymous messages. After two drug-related deaths at his school five years ago, Melrose High School principal Dan Burke instituted an anonymous e-mail system. "I told students, our worst enemy is silence," says Burke, who is retiring this month. "Part of our responsibility as human beings is to help each other." Burke says he helped get seven or eight teens into rehab after receiving anonymous e-mails about them.
Such systems may help in a crisis, but that's not the kind of communication some specialists have in mind.
Under the age of 11, a child with a worry will most likely turn to a parent first, an adult at school second, and a peer last. At older ages, the list reverses. The older the teen, the more likely he or she will turn first to a peer, then to a teacher, and, last, to a parent.
"If the relationship is good, they will always go to parents with really big things," says psychologist Michael Riera, author of "Staying Connected to Your Teenager." Knowing that, he advises parents to explicitly tell teens: "If something is bothering you, is there some adult at school you would talk to?" Then he would ask: "Who?"
Overly anxious parents who immediately go into fix-it mode are perhaps the number-one reason teens stop going to them with problems. Teens interpret a parent's immediate offer of help as a lack of respect and a sign the parent thinks the teen is incompetent or irresponsible .
"When she tells you someone is weird, that's her way of saying, 'Help me figure out what's going on here,' " Riera says. "Now you need to be a translator. Ask, 'Do you mean weird like you never know what he'll say and it makes you uncomfortable? Weird like silly and goofy, so you're embarrassed for her? Or do you mean weird like scary and dangerous?"
Safety, of course, is the most important issue and the one about which parents need to be clearest. Nancy Rappaport, a child and adolescent psychiatrist who runs school programs for the Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard affiliate health-care system, says when a teen does tell a parent something that needs to be acted upon, they should brainstorm together about what that will be: "This is something we can't keep to ourselves. I can talk to another adult, you can talk to another adult, or we can do it together."
Damon says adults generally limit their questions about teens' lives to who, where, and when. Instead, he says, they should try asking what, why, and how: "What do you think of X? Why do you enjoy this? How does that make you feel?"
"Those are the kind of questions that create community," Damon says. "And it's community that gets people -- not just teenagers -- to feel a sense of solidarity, not betrayal, by pointing out that someone needs help."
Barbara Meltz can be reached at meltz@globe.com 
