Mall is No Playground
Published Sunday, March 21, 2004 By Marvin W. Berkowitz
I read a "letters from parents" column recently that concerned the age at which kids can safely and appropriately be dropped off at the shopping mall.
There are many subtexts to this question:
How old are kids before they are responsible without supervision? How safe are kids from predators in public places like a shopping mall? To what are kids exposed when they are wandering a shopping mall? Why are parents "malling" their children, and what messages are they sending to their children by doing so?
All of these are valid and complex questions, well worth considering and answering. But I want to focus on the broader issue of how we value and organize our children’s free time. And the impact on their character.
As I was growing up, we spent our free time mainly in each others’ homes or in the neighborhood (especially in the schoolyard on the baseball fields and basketball courts). Homes were safe, and the neighborhood was safe (of course neither of those are absolutes; even in the relatively idyllic neighborhood where I grew up, husbands sometimes beat their wives and one psychotic child murdered another child, but those were rare events). We were generally supervised in each other’s homes. And the schoolyard was full of kids we already knew from school and the neighborhood.
The activities we engaged in were generally healthy. Even TV, while admittedly not a major growth experience, wasn’t laden with the antisocial messages with which kids are constantly awash today. We played board games and ping pong, talked and watched TV. In the schoolyard, we played ball games, rode our bikes and talked some more. We got fresh air and exercise, and developed (mostly) mutually supportive relationships.
One of the very early covered shopping malls was right in our neighborhood. Perhaps we were dense, but it never seemed to "call" to us as a prime place to hang out and spend our time. It should be no surprise to anyone, but children need peer interaction, exercise, exposure to positive values and nurturant adult supervision. (Malls supply only the first, and that is the easy one.) Malls supply a place to dump children (message: you are a bother) and a place for idle hands to do the devil’s work (message: any activity is better than no activity) and are a magnet for predators (message: the world is a treacherous place) and a showplace for concentrated materialism and consumerism (message: "having" is a fundamental goal, regardless of whether you need it or not).
So, I think we need to be architects of our children’s leisure time as best we can. Especially when they are younger, because they become more responsible, competent and autonomous as they get older. We need to steer them to productive, healthy ways of spending their time. And we need to look deeply at the messages we send to our children through our choices or our failures to make choices.
The messages we send, intentionally or not, shape the character of our children.
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Marvin W. Berkowitz, Ph.D. is the Sanford N. McDonnell professor of character education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His e-mail address is berkowitz@umsl.edu.
