We’re not protecting young people, we’re demonizing them

From the streets of Philadelphia to the boardwalks of New Jersey and beyond, we’ve identified a new common menace: young people.

And rather than react thoughtfully or creatively, we’ve essentially demonized a whole generation.

We’ve banned them from stores and malls and boardwalks, at least without supervision.

And every time they try to tell us what they want, we come back with more supervision, more scheduling, more programs, and more organizations. And while some of that is great — and necessary — what is also necessary for young people is the space to be, to breathe.

To do what so many of us who were teens long ago got to do.

We played outside until the streetlights went on. But we impose curfews on them.

We hung out at the mall with friends. But now they can barely roam anywhere without an adult in tow.

We spent whole summer days and nights at the beach.

And yeah, we were not always where we said we’d be, or where we should be, and when we got caught or things went left, there was often hell to pay.

Which was fair.

What isn’t fair is that older generations, those who benefited from those very same youthful freedoms, now seem to be punishing younger generations for their own failures to create an infrastructure for young people to be, well, young people.

In April, after hundreds of teenagers rampaged through downtown Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson sounded like a lot of other public officials who’ve been dealing with similar incidents in their cities — with one key difference.

“In no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and lakefront this weekend,” Johnson said, referring to two Chicago neighborhoods we could compare with Center City and Penn’s Landing. “It is unacceptable and has no place in our city.”

“However,” he added, urging a comprehensive approach, “it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”

As you might expect, Johnson got a lot of grief for that. It’s much easier, and politically safer, to give the appearance of addressing a complicated issue by blaming — and penalizing — everyone for the actions of a few.

That is not to say that there is no reason to sound the alarm for some of the damaging, dangerous, and even deadly behavior lately. There’s a difference between youthful indiscretions and illegal activity, especially when property is damaged and others are placed in danger. I don’t care how young or bored or rebellious you are: Rage against the machine on your own dime and without hurting others.

But this kind of one-size-fits-all oppressive approach is just not the answer.

Scholars say that because of the lack of appropriate play environments and countless distracting screens, many children have less access to playtime and play spaces than children in the past. And that lack of access leads to all kinds of problems: stress, anxiety, disconnection, depression. And as with most everything else, it’s even worse for children living in poverty, often Black and brown children who often have less access to school and community-based programs, and who are not just demonized but criminalized for their behavior.

Black boys, for instance, often face being judged as more dangerous and more violent than their peers of other backgrounds, racial equity scholar Altheria Caldera told me when we talked this week.

“Behavior is racialized,” she said. “Some people can just get away with things that other people cannot. And the way we determine who can get away with what in our country is largely dependent upon race.”

And that has proven to have deadly consequences, for which we in the media share in the responsibility when we make some people victims and other villains.

We’ve definitely overscheduled and oversupervised our young, and we’ve projected the fears of generations who have been unable — or unwilling — to protect their young people onto them with all kinds of consequences.

But it’s even more than that. In a 2019 op-ed in the New York Times, author Kim Brooks blamed a “fundamental shift in the way we view children and child-rearing, and the way this shift has transformed our schools, our neighborhoods and our relationships to one another and our communities.”

It reminded me of a revealing comment from a high school student in an article by my colleague Nate File about young people seeking safe and accessible places where they actually want to hang. Spoiler alert: It’s rarely the hyper-structured settings we choose for them.

“I think that a lot of times, the police can’t really distinguish between a cool hangout, a safe hangout ... and then just kids looking to cause trouble,” Sizwe Morris-Louis, a high school senior from Mount Airy, told File.

He’s right, but I think it goes beyond the police.

Brooks wrote, “In many ways, America has given up on childhood, and on children.”

The proof is all around us, and it predates a pandemic that made life even smaller and more treacherous for young people.

We are supposed to keep young people safe, but we owe them the same freedom to experience their youth as we had.

“Safe and free,” Brooks said.

And here in Philadelphia, we are failing spectacularly on both fronts.