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Bring back unsupervised third spaces that you don’t tell your parents about.
That’s where you build character.
And find porn.
And burn things. And explode things.
And do sick jumps on your bike
And smoke a little weed then stress reeeeaaaal hard for a few hours
The Fear
They don’t have “a little weed” anymore, it’s all weapons grade real drugs you plug it in to smoke it or you use a blow torch and if you’re so inclined you will have a psychotic episode if you smoke too much. (And by inclined I mean any family history of mental health issues or just shit luck of the draw)
I mean, I dunno about all that but if your point is weed is strong af these days I’m not going to disagree. The weed I smoked in middle school doesn’t have shit on the weed you can buy in a dispensary these days.
When I through that lighter at the wall of the empty foundation of a house that was never built in the woods behind my house and it exploded, I finally felt like myself for the first time
The very concept of unsupervised kids is so anathema to society today. Kids need spaces to just be kids.
Summer camp - the overnight, week or two long kind, is a great middle ground. Yes, kids are “supervised”. But… Mostly, just by bigger kids. Who are there, mostly to have fun too. Run, play, swim, learn about themselves and other people. My boys both spent every summer for 12+ years at camp. And they always grew, so, so much while they were there.
Also hurt yourself and others
Yes that is an important lesson.
This, but unironically
This is a boomer-ass take, but knowing how to deal with a situation where you or someone else gets hurt is a really important skill and reading about it can only get you so far
It’s not so much the getting hurt itself that needs to happen, but being put in situations where you could get hurt so that you learn to evaluate risk.
Getting hurt a little bit is very useful.
I’ve forgotten about plenty of situations where things could’ve gone wrong but didn’t but I can still vividly remember accidentally hitting myself in the dick with my bike handle.
(Since I know someone will want to know: I misjudged my speed and the impact a wet wheel had on my braking power. When I noticed I was going too fast to take a corner I braked and the front brake locked the wheel immediately. Inertia did the rest.)
That and a (thankfully merely scary) run-in with aquaplaning a few years later taught me to be wary of wet driving conditions, especially of braking in them.
That last bit is why I think every new driver needs to spend a few hours on a skid pad.
In my case I wasn’t paying enough attention to where water had pooled in the tracks cars had worn into the road. Gentle taps on the brake handles were enough to decouple my scooter’s wheels from the road and give me a two kilometer braking distance. Yikes.
A few years riding a bike will do the same.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10671218/
Adults who can recall experiences of ultimate freedom to play in their own childhoods find it difficult to give their own children the same room for exploration [10]. In this context, research shows that if children are free to select the level of risk in their play activities, they will frequently choose a higher level than the guiding adult would predict and consider acceptable [11]. A lack of opportunities for risky and challenging play has negative consequences for becoming a healthy adult, such as learning to trust oneself, recognizing one’s limits, and knowing when it is better to ask for support [12].
My dad always said my sister and I both graduated top of the class from the School of Hard Knocks.
My aunt used to say that children’s souls didn’t fully anchor into their bodies until they’d fallen hard on their heads for the first time.
She’s Hungarian, I don’t know if that’s like a cultural myth to make people feel better about dropping their kids or just her own thing.
I wasn’t being ironic. I think knowing how to assess a situation for danger and deal with the consequences of your decisions is very important.
Bones heal, chicks dig scars, and glory is forever.
When I was a kid, sex ed was bush porn. In any patch of urban common land you’d find these little jazz mags under the bushes. I guess they just grew on the bushes, you could tell when they weren’t ripe yet if some of the pages didn’t open
Me and my mates just hung out in the basement of the one with the least responsible parents.
Did all sorts of nasty shit like D&D, board games and binging movies.
Sounds like those were the most responsible parents. Friends groups that don’t have these end up doing heroin instead.
I went to a Nerf tournament and humans vs. zombies game at a college campus a while back. The Nerf hobby has some interesting intersections. On the one hand, there are some legitimately competitive teams who drill and practice and have standardized uniforms and blasters and everything, so there’s some organized sports types in there. On the other hand, it overlaps with the gun hobby, seeing as it’s playing at being a gun fight, and it uses a lot of the same accessories. On the other other hand, it seems to be a very queer-friendly hobby; definitely a lot of flags being represented that weekend.
All of these disparate groups had a great time with each other. Huge range of demographics, all having good wholesome fun, making new friends, using their bodies and their minds, expressing themselves while also respecting the rules and structures of the game and the college campus. It was beautiful.
At the end of the weekend, the college Nerf club, which had been running these events on campus for years, came out and tearfully announced that this would be the last such event, because the college administration had announced there would be no further blaster events permitted on campus. Nobody got hurt that weekend, but presumably the administration was afraid of getting sued if someone did.
And just like that, a beautiful mechanism for bringing together lots of strangers and making them into friends and comrades disappeared in a whiff of imaginary liability for a theoretical accident that hadn’t actually happened.
And we wonder why young people are addicted to social media and video games.
Almost every interesting kind of public event like that is going away due to liability issues. Liability insurance is going through the roof, and the insurance companies are forcing places to stop doing events.
So let’s get rid of insurance companies. They are all a scam anyway.
Name and shame?
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
One time when I was biking home from middle school the office got suspicious that I was biking instead of riding home in a car, and they had to keep me in the office and call my parents
What the actual fuck?
That was always been a rule even 20 years ago. If you are designated as a car rider/walker you can’t just change it on a whim. Parents need to call the front office and change it. Yes being both is an option but the front office needs to know.
I can assume it’s to stop predators from telling kids if they ride their bike to school tomorrow they’ll give them money or something. Also if there’s no plan in place no one will know if you get injured or lost. Having an adult waiting for you or waiting on a call to tell them you made it home can be the difference between life and death sometimes.
I would also really like to see a governmental permit office that distributes permit numbers on demand which can be used for age verification without revealing ANY information about the person verifying to ANY private entities.
I want to see this in a bunch of countries.
yeah there’s three organizations that could provide these permits: government, companies, or non-profit organizations. you can just start your own if you have the technical know-how, just to do a proof-of-concept and to show others how it could be done.
No. Private ID Verification Companies should not be allowed. Companies can’t even be trusted to handle fucking credit scores or train tickets.
Government office or no verification, that is where I stand.
Yeah, I think you’re correct, even if a private company was started with the idea not to sell the data collected for this endeavor, or even not to collect identifying information. It would still end up eventually collecting the data and eventually selling the information. And if somehow it didn’t then someone else would compete with that company and then that company would do so.
Like malls, parks, the skate park?
arcades, bowling alleys and skating rinks.
coffee shops, record stores, hobby shops.
These places kind of still exist, just they all require that you spend money. The landlords have gotten out of control so no one can afford to not constantly be charging money for these kinds of spaces, so they just keep going out of business
The newest bowling ally here charges per person, per minute. So you but like 30min-1hr not even a full game. So the more people the worse the value 🙄
Sucks because at parties often running out of time around the 8th or 9th frame.
Rec centers, pools, and under 18 clubs.
All with plenty of “NO LOITERING” and “CUSTOMERS ONLY” signs to min-max value extraction.
This is a pet peeve of mine. Well, more than a peeve.
When I grew up I spent significant time in youth centers, made social connections, formed my music taste and my first band. All away from my parents.
These do not exist anymore around where I live. So where do kids hang out these days? In the mall. It’s so fucked up, people glance at them as if they were shop mannequins. And they take the pose, with the chewing gum and the phone. That’s no way to spend your free time.
PS: an interesting variation was a Sleeping Space - some folks had formed an association and rented some space for people to hang out, literally: lots of cushions and mattresses, very quiet. It was amazing even though not many people actually slept there.
PPS: free entry and not being asked to leave is what they all had in common.
But where will I park my car and how will those places make money, that’s America today
It won’t matter when technology is designed to steal your attention at all times. Corporations help cause this situation by selling products that addict everyone and they’re getting damned good at it. How long did it take for social media and entertainment through phones to occupy everyone’s day? People spend hours a day not their phones, time that was available for socializing even 15 years ago. You can bring 3rd places back it it’s all competing with other attentions grabbers made by billion dollar industries.
Which means what?
A first space refers to the place you live.
A second space is where you spend most of your time that is not at home, like work or school.
A third space is everything else. Shops, restaurants, parks, etc.
The issue that young people are facing is that there isn’t really anywhere they can exist that isnt at home or school. Communal spaces where young people are allowed to spend time, especially places where there isnt an expectation to spend money constantly have been eroding away over the past 30 years.
It’s not a coincidence why most pre-2000 teenager-focused media has the mall as a main setting
The not spending money part is soo key. We should not have to spend money every time we leave our homes.
Thanks for the explanation. Is a second space a space you’re obligated to be, like work/school, or just anywhere you spend most of your time regardless?
in sociology it’s home = first place, and workplace = second place, but Ray Oldenburg calls second place anywhere you spend most of the time when you’re awake
Thank you for that detail
Parks, libraries, community centers, free museums, beaches, etc.
A lot of those places ban unaccompanied minors.
Exactly the problem.
Best we can do are Discord servers
I’m guessing home is first space, work/school is second. Anywhere else is third?
Yeah, but a good third space doesn’t expect you to spend money. And obvs still allows you to be there.
It can certainly offer you the opportunity to spend money, but it doesn’t have to make money from every person.
Card shops are sometimes an example. Church. Coffee shops (but who hangs out there?)
Walkable villages would help a lot. Car brain is hurting our kids and teenagers.
Coffee shops (but who hangs out there?)
Growing up during the Starbucks boom, coffee shops were absolutely a place to hang out after school. There was probably one a short walk or drive from school, and for less than $5 you could grab a sugary drink or a pastry and hang out in a comfortable indoor space with a few friends. Heck, one of your friends probably worked there. It worked great for high schoolers because there wasn’t any alcohol (so minors could be there), you didn’t have to be as quiet as a library, and you could head there regardless of the weather. COVID has probably changed a lot of that as coffee shops focus more on drive throughs and mobile orders, not to mention inflation.
I honestly hadn’t thought about card shops as third spaces, but they absolutely can be. Also libraries, book stores, etc.
yea, that’s pretty much it. third spaces include stuff like bars, public libraries, parks, public squares… basically, places where you can socialize outside of work.
they still exist, obviously, but many of them have disappeared over the years, especially the ones that don’t expect you to pay. it’s even worse in suburbs, especially car-dependent suburbs, because those are zoned as housing only (so no libraries, bars, sometimes not even a park), and if you’re a kid you can’t drive to a city, so outside of school (and maybe extracurricular activities, if your parents can afford those), you’re stuck at home where the only place you can socialize is the internet.
I don’t want to fix anyone’s social media addiction. I want to bitch about kids on social media and feel like a genius
I work at a museum and our director has started using the term third space to justify a finacialization of our non-profit. Be mindful of how the term is being used by capitalists to extract more resources.
If spending money is required, it’s not a third space, full stop.
Just, giving them a future to believe in might help too.
I’m so glad I have my kids in scouts. It’s our third place, and I am now an assistant scoutmaster. I know there is controversy and history but ours is a very progressive troop, has been since its inception (we included girls before it was “allowed” and have a very diverse group of kids and adults).
They are growing up so much more grounded than some I see; being exposed to and relying on each other as they build their community. My oldest is staffing camp this summer, and I’m so proud that he’s making a good impact on so many young people.
Third spaces are hard to find, but find a good one, they make life worth it, they provide perspective and build relationships with people who have shared interests, leading to genuine freindship.
What third space did we used to have as kids that we no longer have?
Malls, Chuck-E-Cheese, walkable neighborhoods and main streets, a lot of diners and such have been shut down in the past half century. Cities have kind of restructured around increased industry and productivity.
Parks are making a comeback, though, I hear.
EDIT: OH, and LIBRARIES. For clear reasons conservatives the world over are trying tk dismantle public libraries.
You forgot construction sites, drainage gullies, and random patches of forest.
Oh, and the middle of corn fields. That’s where Amish kids would go to party in my day. They had the best weed.
Parks aren’t even always useful, as they require driving to. And worst of all, most cities dictate only allow park use during daylight hours because they want to keep the homeless away.
I think that’s precisely the issue. They should be more accessible to everyone, particularly on foot.
This is an American problem that is not applicable to other parts of the world
Chuck e cheese still exists. They look more like a Dave and busters inside though
Here in Portland, I’m not sure that the city and suburbs were any more walkable in the past than they are today.
Outside
Outside still exists…
For kids growing up in car-dependent suburbia, outside does not exist. If you can’t drive, you’re trapped in your home, unless you want to just go for a walk among endless identical winding cookie cutter streets.
Where is a kid in suburbia supposed to go that’s actually within walking distance? I suppose they could just hang out on the street. But homeowners seeing a group of teen loitering on the sidewalk in front of their home will call the cops. Hell, sometimes just walking around is enough to get a group of teens harassed by police.
“Hell” sound like an accurate description. I wouldn’t want to live in such a place as an adult, much less a minor.
Outside™: now with more extreme heat watches and smoke advisories!
Not really.
I’m old enough to remember when grade school kids could get on a bus or subway alone without anyone saying anything.
If you made ‘Stand By Me’ today all the parents would be locked up for child endangerment.
Sure… but it’s not so much that places have changed, but that parenting has.
I mean, if you can’t just show up, than the places have changed.
Most kids today can’t just go outside with all their friends and come back when the streetlights turn on like many of us did as kids.
Yes, but very few parents just let their kids run around outside. Very few kids get to walk or bike to friends houses, without adult supervision. We have all internalized “stranger danger” and the “danger” that random people are to kids.
In my suburban high school social world, before cell phones:
- Loitering around shopping malls
- Showing up to the movie theater an hour or two before the movie we all agreed to watch together, and then an hour or two after.
- Parks and playgrounds if the weather was ok
- Cafes, diners, restaurants where lingering was tolerated, even for those who didn’t order anything.
- Local sporting events (usually high school or rec league teams).
A lot of these still exist in some degree, but the loss of malls and movie theaters has really put a damper on things, and the rise of cell phones has deemphasized the need for in person interactions with peers (rather than following an influencer on social media).
I’m going to throw in ‘the local field that isn’t a park but people use it like one.’
Yep. The good old vacant lot that nobody gives a shit about. Really underrated place for kids.
Loitering was basically never prosecuted. Now it is. Just hanging out at the movie theater for an hour or two before/after a movie sounds like a great way to get arrested.
TBH I hadn’t noticed the loss of malls. I guess that’s a problem though. Around me there’s still plenty.
There’s still lots of malls … but they’re empty. And often prohibit minors without an adult.
mostly a park to sit around at.
and what i miss more than the park, is the people to hang around with. it just seems like nobody got time these days.
