VALLEY Parenting : Surviving the Teen-Age Years : Coping as an Outsider

Lunch is the most dreaded time of the day for Elizabeth, 13. With no one to hang out with, the gangly eighth-grader usually spends the hour in the library at her junior high school. Clusters of students sometimes giggle and whisper as she passes. Someone once even conked her on the head with an apple.

“People make cracks because I don’t dress like they do,” said the West Valley teen-ager, who asked that her last name be withheld. “I don’t wear the baggy pants and oversized shirts. And I’m not social enough. I’m shy.”

As Elizabeth has painfully learned, students in junior high and middle school can be roughly divided into two categories. There are the kids who have latched onto a clique. They are “in”--at least among their own little group. And there are the kids who don’t fit in. They are “out.” And they are hurting.

“It’s a lonely existence,” said Elizabeth’s mother. “My daughter is extremely alienated. She feels she has no chance of being accepted. She has so many good qualities, but she doesn’t wear the clothes, doesn’t do the makeup, doesn’t chase after the boys. I would like to go stomping in on campus and say, ‘What is going on?’ but she is at the age where I can’t.”

While kids begin forming friendships as early as preschool, such relationships take on immense significance in junior high. “Cliques are a very important part of early adolescent life,” said Woodland Hills psychologist Diane Ross Glazer, who specializes in helping children and teen-agers. “The junior high years are a time of separating from parents and pulling toward peers, and cliques allow children to do that. But because they are so important, they are very powerful. They hold sway over behaviors and mannerisms, over how you talk, wear your hair, how you dress. They pass judgment on who is in, who is out, who is cool and who is not cool.”

Children who are shy or perceived as “nerds” are often targets of other students’ scorn. For example, Tom Blake, an eighth-grader at Portola Middle School in Tarzana, admitted, “I intentionally get on one nerdy kid’s nerves and make fun of him.” When asked why he picks on the other boy, Tom, who is part of a clique known as the “trendies,” answered, “Because he’s strange.”

Other children are excluded for no particular reason. Portola sixth-grader Jammie Smith said she “messes with people” just because they are not “us.” “We say ‘Get away from us! Get away!’ ” she said. “We take their food and throw it in the trash can. We are just like that. I don’t know why.”

Even kids who belong to a clique may find themselves cruelly booted out without warning. That’s what happened last year to Gina Russo, a Portola seventh-grader. When a vicious, untrue rumor began circulating about her, her circle of friends quit speaking to her. “Nobody would associate with me,” she said. “It felt horrible. I felt really, really, really bad. I would go home and cry.”

Being rebuffed by one’s peers is not only hurtful; it can actually retard social skills. “I get kids in my office crying that ‘nobody likes me,’ ” said Judy Godessoff, an L.A. Unified psychologist who works with Valley youngsters. “The kids who are ostracized are so uncomfortable with themselves that they give up. They don’t learn the social skills to make friends; they don’t know how to approach someone and start a conversation.”

Teachers and counselors often watch out for and assist young outcasts. The adults may ask friendless children to run errands or help out in the office to boost the child’s wounded self-esteem, or they may introduce them to other students. Said Portola counselor Deborah Wiltz: “There are some kids who make it their business to seek out lonely people and take care of them like mother ducks. We point out students who need friendship or TLC and ask these kids to take them under their wing.”

But such intervention can only do so much. “Kids pretty much have to adjust on their own,” Wiltz said. “Many kids begin shy and alone, but eventually they find their little niche. The only students who don’t have any friends are the ones who won’t speak to anyone.”

Elizabeth, the lonely eighth-grader, said she has begun to form her own clan with other students who seek lunchtime refuge in the library. She also made a vow to say ‘hi’ to more people. Though it was tough for the timid girl to risk rejection, the effort paid off. “I made a friend on the first day of school,” she said proudly.