How and why are teens allowed to roam the roads freely for hours?

[LadyGillingham]

Where is parental responsibility? My parents had to know where I was, who I was with and it was always timeboxed. Good behaviour was expected at all times. I’ve seen young teens on bikes, at all hours, hanging around the high street - shouting, littering, damaging property etc.

Parents must be held accountable and charged for neglect alongside violent crimes by children. That old man (Bhim Kohli) didn’t deserve to be murdered. Why aren’t parents being held accountable? Feral kids are a result of neglect.

And thats the other problem... parents thinking they know where their teens are because they "track them". You know where their phone is.

Aimlessly hanging about with your mates is actually and important part of teenage and social brain development.

Held accountable by whom?

I think an in between normal school and prison for troubled, anti social behaviour kids like a military style boarding school with fun stuff too to show them what a “good structured life” can be like, and not impacting their future potential like a prison record would, could be a good solution. But obviously there’s no funding and probably no appetite for it.

Your boys sound lovely, normal lads and, to be fair, I don't think your boys are the 'kind' of young people the OP was referring to. You are obviously being the kind of parent that we need to see more of.

In my area, it's not unusual to see boys of 12 or 13, on electric scooters, clad in black, delivering drugs (i.e. tiny parcels going to houses, what else could it be?) etc. It's awful and nothing is done.

The only people in groups you see now at all hours loitering about are young migrant men.

Dearest @LadyGillingham

With all due respect my lady you are deluded.

Since the end of the Second World War teens have hung around in groups. I grew up in the 70s/80s and all we did was hang around the streets and in parks usually drinking cheap lager and smoking cigarettes. This was a middle class area. My parents knew I was local but had no idea where I was.

Today I see far less teenagers out and about. Most are holed up in their rooms on screens.

And to be fair to the ones who are out and about, there is nothing for them to do! We need to bring back youth clubs etc. Channel their growing brains and need for autonomy and risk taking. In the UK we are crap at prioritising this sort of thing for kids.

We're all allowed to roam the roads freely for hours. Are you proposing that one sector of society only be subject to a curfew, purely because of their age?

Anti social behaviour and teens hanging out are two completely different things.

My two young yeenagers go out with their friends. They go to the park to play football and to the skate park, they go to the shop, they go into town and get a McDonald's, they go and sit on the beach. They're back at acceptable times, behave themselves and don't get into trouble - I know this because there's been posts in out local Facebook group about them and their friends complimenting them and saying how nice it is to see kids out enjoying themselves in the sun and behaving well.

I also know roughly where they are at all times- they phone and check in every hour or so, and let me know if they're moving location from say the park to town.

Fortunately around our area we are also lucky to have three separate youth clubs that arrange activities after school and during the holidays for teens for free, also providing drinks snd snacks (pot noodles, biscuits, fruit etc) and the youth bus sits in the local park three times a week for an hour, giving the kids a safe space to head to to get a drink or snack, trusted adults and so on.

Not all children hanging out are trouble makers. The majority aren't, they're teenagers who want to spend time with their friends. It's the ones who haven't been taught how to behave in public that cause the problems & they're likely to be the same as adults!

i do think we need to look at societal breakdown as a whole, discipline, respect, and we need to teach kids about resilence, knock backs, emotional intelligence, ambition, work ethic etc etc. all of which have been dumbed down in favour of political correctness.
people don’t like to hear it but we also need to look at the absence of me role models in lots of kids lives/ not just dads but teachers, uncles, sports etc…

This is utter nonsense @millymollymoomoo. “Political correctness” is blamed for kids not being allowed to call my daughter a disabled slur. Is that something she just has to be resilient to? Her life means she has resilience in bucket loads. She is facing her exams in a couple of weeks having just discovered her support assistant of 4 years will not be there and she will have to rely on someone she doesn’t know and trust to be there for her during that time. God knows how a 15 year old bounces back from that to do their best.

The teenagers I know are no different from how I was at that age, 35 years ago. This notion that today’s teens are somehow way worse than we were is laughable. The older generations said exactly the same about us and they were wrong too (in fact It’s been going on for centuries). The world evolves so we recognise the problems of the past and correct them. Thank god we don’t raise kids as we used to back then. I was there, I know how rotten it was.

If you have a problem with today’s young generation, it is not down to them. It is down to you, and every other older generation because we made them what they are today. The teens in my life are brilliant, and complex, and funny. They have been through a global pandemic at an age where they couldn’t really understand it but they just got on with it. They are dealing with cuts in education, are heading out to a university system that is on its knees, and a world in economic and political turmoil which they will be paying for their whole lives. We have fucked the world up for them and they will be the ones who have to fix it.

Thankfully, for the most part, they are being raised in a way which means they are absolutely ready to do that. Stop doing them down using tabloid tropes of how terrible they are. It wasn’t clever when previous generations did it and it isn’t clever now.

One of the biggest changes in the last 20 yrs is the coverage that things get either by 24 hour news or instant social media.

Everybody has a dash cam, a ring doorbell ( with the same fucking ring) and people have become amateur security guards and detectives overnight.

Growing up in the 70/80s if something didn't happen directly to you, you'd have to wait til Thursday to read about it in the weekly gazette

It's the ones who haven't been taught how to behave in public that cause the problems & they're likely to be the same as adults!

Except they won’t be the same when they are adults,@EmmaEmEmz. When I look at the kids who caused trouble at school, they are now fully functioning adults who aren’t running riot at night or terrorising people. The most problematic kid in our year, known for being a bully and vandalising the town, is now a Squadron Leader in the RAF who won medals and commendations for his leadership in various conflicts. Turns out what he needed as a teen was people who believed in him and encouraged his potential. People call that coddling nowadays, but actually it is exactly what some people need. Kids who cause trouble are just kids who need some direction and guidance. When they get that as adults, they manage just fine in the world.

This may be what you see user-loadsanumbers but it isn’t what I see.

I don't understand why teens wander about at night. Mine are 17 and 14 and would find that nothing more than boring. The 17 year old loves the gym and golf and my youngest is either rebuilding his computer, playing the piano and guitar or playing D&D. I feel very relieved that neither of them have shown any inclination to just go out randomly wandering and looking for mischief!

I have never seen that.

Lockdown had it's uses.
I totally agree. Teens shouldn't be just allowed to roam the streets.
We are learning nothing.
The teens that killed Gary Newlove outside his home in 2007 had been roaming the streets, drinking and looking for trouble.
About time there was a crackdown.

Too much freedom isn't necessarily a good thing.
There is nobody that has the balls to implement anything strict for the good of the country.

That's cos you've bought them.up properly. Alot of these parents couldn't care less what the offspring are doing and have lost control.
It's a pity it's not harder to have a child in the first place.

What do you think should be implemented? A 9pm curfew for teenagers?

It's not about kids being out a lot. I grew up in the 80s-90s and we were out with my sis all the time playing with other kids and parents had only a vague idea where we were. The naughtiest thing we ever did was run in the fields of wheat and that was when a neignbour noticed us and started shouting: 'You are stomping on bread!!!' We ran away scared. But today that lady would get lots of abuse.
Because what is happening now, is the fallout of the recent idea/trend to put the child at the centre of everything, prioritising the flattery over punishments and a crackdown of any types of disciplinary methods deemed now as abusive replaced by 'taking away devices' which IMHO simply does not work. Add to this 2 years of Covid that reinforced the isolation, smart phone/social media addiction. The families falling apart as a result of prioritising own happiness and 'self-care' (ego) resulting in traditional role models (teachers, the elderly) replaced by social media celebrities.
And now, how to fix it... maybe the Tory idea of the National Service was not that bad after all... it would reinforce some good ideas in our kids. Maybe some obligatory hours of voluntary work at secondary school in animal refuge, care home, hospital, etc. We have to do something.

A crackdown on what exactly? Are we talking curfews? Specific locations? Times of year? Ages?

Should I tell 13 yo DD she can’t go to the skate park tomorrow because Suzie on the internet thinks she shouldn’t be allowed out by herself until she’s 18?

As a teen I was always out wandering around the streets - I didn’t shout, litter or damage anything, was just out wandering about with my mates because we hated being in the house. Allowing kids out isn’t the issue, not teaching them respect for others/property is an issue.

They obviously got the Shein version rather than the branded ,good quality stuff.

I was a child in the 1960s/70’s and we roamed about all day with no phones and no parental supervision.
However we never ever did anything wrong, not even dropping a piece of litter never mind stabbing someone.
I don’t know why, we were just shit scared of doing anything wrong and making our parents angry; despite the fact that my parents didn’t really shout and I only once got a tap on the legs for being mean to my sister.
Im not sure why we were well behaved; society expectations?

Groups of teens have always wandered the streets. Maybe not if you live in a nice middle class area where mum only works part time & ferries their kids to activities but if you live in a working class area where both parents are working shifts and you can't afford to send them to football training or dance classes then there is nothing for these kids to do.

As a 13 year old I the 80's I wandered the streets with my friends. My parents generation had free youth clubs they could go to or were more involved with church youth groups.

By “we” do you mean you and your group of friends or every single kids in the neighbourhood/area/town/country?

Me and my friends were the same as you , but we were also very aware that the rough kids existed and who they were. In fact, nearly every section of the town (how it was split back then) had its own gang of them. Sometimes there were fights/wars, especially since the only thing splitting them was a main street. “Fun” times.