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The world seems intent on locking Gen Z down.
As children, they were given smartphones and iPads which taught them to see the world through a screen, rather than with their own eyes. As tweens and teens, their schools were shut down, sending them into the solitude of Zoom classes in their bedrooms.
And now they’re being shut out of communal spaces.
In Albany, unaccompanied teens are getting categorically banned from bowling alleys, roller skating rinks, and even grocery stores — sending them onto the streets or back to their screens for entertainment.
“Our culture keeps complaining about kids addicted to their phones,” Lenore Skenazy, president of kid-focused non-profit Let Grow and author of “Free Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry” told The Post.
“But when they are not allowed any place where they can meet up in real life, old-school, they turn to the escape hatch provided by [ex Apple CEO] Steve Jobs.”
She’s right.
It’s hard to imagine more wholesome settings than bowling alleys and roller skating rinks. But the Times Union reported that business owners think teens are disruptive and noisy, and say they’re more likely to get into fights or shoplift.
According to the paper, “signs are going up at many stores” saying no teens allowed without parents.
Bans in Albany have also popped up in bookstores, at fast food joints, and at the Six Flags Great Escape amusement park in Queensbury, New York — a former favorite of Albany teens which enforces a strict chaperone policy.
A 17-year-old who wants to go spend a summer day at an amusement park with friends isn’t able to, even if it’s a wholesome way to spend time with their pals. At some locations, older siblings don’t even count. And these policies stand to disproportionately impact children of working parents.
It’s not just Albany. The same thing happened at Brooklyn’s Atlantic Terminal Mall, which banned teens without an adult in 2024 after fights continued to break out after school.
These kids are old enough to take a summer job in these stores, but they can’t patronize them on their own.
“Some kids can be rowdy or worse,” Skenazy admitted. “Establishments can and should deal with them, even kicking them out if necessary. But don’t forbid all kids under 18 from being part of the real world just because some are jerks.”
We so often complain about “kids these days” growing up on screens and refusing to be social, but we simultaneously refuse to give them the same third spaces that prior generations treasured. When it’s not business owners barring them entry, it’s often parents refusing to allow their kids to go out and have fun on their own.
Jonathan Haidt, author of the bestselling “Anxious Generation,” has long warned that a decline in teens hanging out with friends, partying, and even getting drivers’ licenses could be causing a decline in mental health, as they replace that outdoors, social stimulation with the antisocial alternative of social media.
Gen Z knows that this hasn’t been good for them — and they long for a better world.
A June poll from the United Kingdom found that 87% of young people aged 18 to 30 think that they have fewer in-person opportunities to connect than prior generations did.
And, according to Skenazy’s poll of 8-to-12-year-olds, kids are much more likely to say they’d want to hang out with friends in-person in an unstructured setting than they are to prefer an organized activity or spending time online.
That’s the sad truth: kids are turning to their screens or turning to the streets, when they secretly long for the sort of healthy social activity their parents had.
Society can’t ask kids to be more social and then ban them from exactly the types of places they might do that.
We have to pick a lane — either accept a bit of teen mischief as a cost of doing business, or lock teens out of society to extinguish the potential of a little trouble.
