Her Listening Post

The caller is a sobbing 14-year-old girl in Whittier, trying to get away from her abusive mother. The girl says she is hiding at a neighbor’s house. Her mother just beat her and is looking for her again, a pattern repeated for years despite family therapy and intervention by the Department of Children and Family Services. “I don’t feel safe right now,” the caller says between sobs. She wants help finding a shelter.

The girl who picked up the ringing phone, 16-year-old Pamela Rosoff, isn’t much older than the caller. But for the last eight months the Los Angeles teenager has volunteered at Teen Line, a confidential hotline at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center that is staffed seven nights a week from 6 to 10 by trained teenage listeners. “You’re really brave to be telling me this,” says Rosoff, who sounds flustered but concerned. “It’s not OK that she’s hurting you like this. You don’t deserve it.”

Seated behind Rosoff on this particular Tuesday evening is Elaine Leader, co-founder and executive director of Teen Line, which turns 25 this year and is among the busiest, most comprehensive and well-known teen-to-teen counseling programs in the country. A pale 77-year-old great-grandmother in tennis shoes and a faux-fur hat, the London-born Leader first envisioned Teen Line while a senior clinician at Thalians Mental Health Center at Cedars-Sinai’s Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health, where she began running a therapy group for adolescents with colleague Miguel Ramirez in 1973. Six years later, they began working with Dr. Terry Lipton, a psychiatric consultant at Thalians, and became convinced that teens say things to each other in therapy groups that they would never say to an adult. That’s why, when someone calls Teen Line, the voice on the other end of the phone will always be another teen.

From her ringside seat, Leader has for more than two decades had an unrivaled view into the collective soul of L.A.’s teenagers--the pain, the wonder, the coolness and doubt. She is equally at home talking about suicide, bulimia and self-mutilation as she is about prom dates, transgender fashion, stepparents and oral sex. Part social rebel, part proper English dame, she is an ombudsman for the all-but-invisible population she serves.

Teen Line receives about 8,000 phone calls and more than 1,000 e-mails per year about every possible manifestation of teenage angst and unhappiness, from the mundane to the truly sordid. Leader’s work also takes her to the podium at high schools and church groups, the police academy and education workshops around the state. She usually arrives accompanied by a personal army of worst-case scenarios--young survivors, their psychological wounds still raw. They hammer home the message that it’s important to get help if you’re feeling depressed or suicidal. By Leader’s estimate, about 20,000 students attended her Teen Line presentations last year.

Leader is struck primarily by how the pace of teen life has picked up--and the rate at which young peoples’ problems now accelerate. She is particularly haunted by statistics from a few years ago showing that suicide rates for children between 10 and 14 had increased 99% in less than two decades. “It’s this information age, this computer and instant everything,” says Leader, who holds a doctorate degree from the California (now Sanville) Institute for Clinical Social Work and runs a therapy practice from her Beverlywood home. “Everything is rush, rush, rush. [But] human relations take time. You can’t resolve everything in one second. Kids expect things to work out in a half hour.”

Leader believes that harried pace, and the ever-evolving technologies that help them keep up with it, often mean that parents and teenagers short-change the communication processes. “Parents are so busy that they don’t have the time they really need to give to their adolescent children,” she says. “Once their kids can get themselves back and forth to school and aren’t supposed to need so much supervision over homework, the parents tend to give them too much freedom. So they are not around to hear the beginnings of trouble. I think that’s a shame. I think parents need to know it’s OK to exert their authority without being punitive.”

Even though teens often seem to be in constant contact with each other via phones, e-mail and instant messaging, Leader believes those technologies are a poor substitute for face time. Parents, meanwhile, often mistake the ability to stay in contact with their teens for genuine closeness. “There’s so much instant messaging and text messaging going on among teenagers now. I don’t consider that real dialogue.

“One of the things I always tell parents is that you really don’t need to say too much,” Leader says. “What you really need to do is listen, listen, listen. Let’s face it, most people don’t like to be told what to do, but they do like to be heard. I think it’s really important for parents to acknowledge when their kid is in pain by reflecting their feelings.”

Leader also thinks many parents rush too quickly to comfort their children without first taking time to allow them to express their pain. “If you say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, you’ll feel better,’ you’re cutting off the dialogue. As soon as you rush in to reassure, you cut off any kind of discussion of what’s hurting. That goes for any age. It’s really important to let them experience their feelings, but parents hate to see their children hurting.”

Leader disagrees with the notion that misery is a requirement for being a teenager, yet she’s painfully aware that sometimes it’s the kids who seem the most together who end up taking their own lives. “I think there are teenagers who are happy at times. They’re either over-the-top very happy or down in the gloom,” she says. “You may think they’ve all got bipolar disorder but they haven’t, they’re just moody. . . . I think I like them because they are like that, because they’re interesting and they’re not static.”

The Teen Line call center is open every night from 6 to 10, at (800) TLC-TEEN, (310) 855-HOPE or online at www.teenlineonline.org.