Kids need safe places to meet, play and grow

Excerpts:

"Once upon a time, 7-year-olds would go to the playground to play with 8- or 11-year-olds, whoever was available. This is the kind of play that develops social skills and teaches tolerance for others.

Today children are participating mostly in planned, adult-supervised pastimes, like soccer, karate or Irish dance. Rough-and-tumble, impromptu, anyone-can-play scenarios have disappeared.

Working parents are one reason: Fewer adults are available to keep an eye and ear out for kids playing near home. Another reason is the draw of electronic games and an achievement-oriented take on sports that values experience on organized teams over pickup games.

Add a pervasive fear of child-snatching, and free-form play that demands natural socializing grows even rarer. This opens the door for a meaner, less tolerant culture, which we see in popular television programs and films, and which our children come to imitate."

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"The old model offered by churches such as The Catholic Youth Organization or Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts don't attract the hordes they once did. Town recreation departments offer craft or dance classes that parents can sign kids up for, but that's not the unstructured, mixed-age atmosphere where teens can hone their social skills.

Some communities try with private skateboarding parks and ice skating rinks. Parks like Heckscher State Park dedicate areas for bikes and in-line skating; perhaps they could organize teen biking or skating afternoons. Town libraries, believe it or not, offer some of the most progressive options. Islip librarian for young adults, Mark Irish, says, "Libraries like us hold popular gaming nights, hosting tween and teen video game tournaments and board games like Monopoly and Clue."

While libraries may not draw crowds, their formula - offering a kid-friendly activity without adults running things yet providing supervision - bears taking notice. Every town has a resource, a public park, a beach area, school buildings, abandoned movie theaters that could be adapted to adolescent usage and activities."

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"It will take raised consciousness on the part of parents, school officials, community leaders, local businesses and town office holders to recognize that our young deserve social sights, not just social sites. Then it will require vision and funds for insurance and oversight.

Communities have to offer events or locales that kids actually want, so let's include teens in the planning. Towns do an excellent job servicing the senior citizens with programs and big-band concerts, so why not do the same for adolescents?

Headlines teem with socializing-gone-wrong stories like the La Boom Club tragedy or exposés about parents who host underage drinking parties to keep kids from drinking illegally. But as parents, we have a responsibility to do better than that: to get positive and proactive. Let's mobilize because children just want to have fun hanging out. They're entitled to it."