By Suzanne Fields, Los Angeles Times Syndicate

July 1999 – Courtney is not her real name, but she’s a real person. She’s a teenager in Reston, Virginia, an upper-middle class suburb of Washington, and politicians and parents, feminists and family-values folk ought to pay attention to her because what Courtney thinks about sex tells us a lot about a youth culture that lacks adult guidance.

She’s one of eight adolescents who trusted Patricia Hersch, author and the mother of three sons, to talk to her about what it’s like to be a middle-class teenager growing up today. Hersch records it all in an important and poignant book called A Tribe Apart… A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence.

The author gets behind the teenage bravado to reach into the lonely center of teenage life. Here’s Courtney reflecting on being a preteen: “In seventh grade you know all the facts about (sex). You see TV and movies… and you think it would be perfect. But you don’t really think about the actual act of sex.…You don’t knowhow it’s going to feel, or that you have to trust someone.You just think,he’s a hot guy, let’s have sex. And of course, in seventh grade, you don’t really mean it.”

By age 14, Courtney is being pressured by a 15-year-old boy named Nat who has already had sexual relations with at least three girls. He tells Courtney he loves her. She doesn’t really believe him. She makes up all kinds of excuses “not to” but he wears her down. They do “it.” She has to produce the condom (she has “tons” of them.)

Courtney doesn’t enjoy the sex. Nat was all big talk and little knowledge. Once she is no longer a virgin, he stops telling her that he loves her. He reduces his love talk to one kiss. He “cheats” on her with other girls. They break up and she feels angry, frustrated, and humiliated. She doesn’t know how “this bad experience” will affect her later, but she knows that at 14 she’s bored.

What’s astonishing about Courtney’s story is how unremarkable it is. All the talk of sex education experts and hand-wringing moralists totally misses the point of Courtney’s experience. Girls like Courtney and boys like Nat live in a culture that doesn’t really have a clue to the lives kids lead because the adults are too busy working with jobs and careers.

These adolescents aren’t rebels. Rebellion requires limits. Rebellion requires supervision. Rebellion requires something to sneak away from. Rebellion is about not getting caught by a mom, a nosy neighbor, or a spinster aunt.

These kids live in neighborhoods where nobody’s home. Whatever they do, whether for good or bad, easily escapes the detection of adults.

“In the vacuum where traditional behavioral expectations for young people used to exist, in the silence of empty homes and neighborhoods, young people have built their own community,” writes Hersch. “The adolescent community is a creation by default.… Their dependence on each other fulfills the universal human longing for community, and inadvertency cements the notion of a tribe apart."

Her book contains all the requisite statistics about teenage problems, but what’s original in its insight is the recognition of the “aloneness” of the adolescents. Without any parents or neighbors at home after school, they have little time to engage adults in conversation, to observe, imitate, interact, or even reject their ideas.

Music and television are culprits as background music for synthetic experiences. But the foreground is a community bereft of adults for long afternoons where the teenagers come and go acting according to how they think their peers expect them to act, not their own desires; how they want to be seen, not how they want to be.

The town of Reston, where these children come of age is a planned community – planned for diversity, for safety and for shelter – but somehow the adults forgot to plan for themselves to be there too. In that sense it’s the Our Town of the ’90s, and there’s a lesson here for all of us. We’d better think about the answers.