A large shopping complex near us has a problem.
Some nights, a hundred or more teenagers gather at the theater end of the shopping mall just to hang out. Many never pay to see a show. They hang out, that is, loiter, often till after midnight, especially when parents are late picking them up.
The mall is apparently being used as a babysitting service.
Some of the kids have no way to get home by themselves.
The police chief and local officials point out that the communities involved have provided little or nothing for the kids to do with their free time.
The mid-teenagers have nothing to do but hang out in a mall!
Do communities really have to provide things for the kids to do after school?? And if they don’t, are the kids utterly helpless to find anything constructive to do? Or at least benign to do?
Good God!
How did we who were born sixty or more years ago ever survive those benighted decades of the 1940’s-60’s?
We went to a rare movie there a week or so ago and were greeted by something we had never seen before: six police cars outside the theater; six officers inside bolstered by two security guards.
I asked the ticket seller what was going on. She said that kids sometimes caused a little trouble when certain movies were being shown.
We were told by one officer that such problems are routine.
Of course, it is easy to sit at the keyboard and criticize, but one has to wonder.
Nothing to do??? Significant numbers of parents who use a mall as a babysitting service??
I think now more than ever that youth is wasted on the young.
And in the papers this AM is an item about a school district paying students to participate in tutoring…and giving them raises when their grades improve.
As the ad used to say, “We’ve come a long way, Babe!”
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1 comment:
This sad commentary reflects the parentinmg technique of way too many. And it's just one of a thousand symptoms of our "me" society, in this case for parents just too "busy" or absorbed to deal with a teenager who's bored. Or worse yet, they simply don't want to deal with them. No curfew, no requirement about who they're with, etc. etc.. And of course, no discipline.
In my own community, we actually had to shut down the township library for kids during the hours of 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.. Why? Because the library had become the "latch-key" children's day care, until the parent could pick them up. So the kids get bored, and then they get roudy and distructive like the little pack animals they tend to be at age 13.
No interest in the books, or possibly getting some homework done! "Are you kidding?"
No...kids haven't really changed all that much in 40 years. But their parents damn sure have!
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