Kids These Days…Deserve Better

(Source: Unsplash/Devin Avery.)

This past Thanksgiving, I found myself standing in the living room of my in-laws, surrounded by family members but fixated on my nine-week-old baby, who was trying to sleep. At first, I petitioned the teenage nieces sitting on the front porch to rock him to sleep in his car seat (they heartily obliged), but a few moments in, it became clear that high-pitched teenage chit-chat is too distracting for a sleepy nine-week old. So, out came the stroller.

What should have been the most inconspicuous, calm outing quickly turned into a complex ordeal. Surprisingly, all four teenage girls opted to join when I offered. We wrestled the stroller out of the trunk and assembled the pieces, then ran in and out of the house several times for missing bags and scarves. My father-in-law’s eyes widened when I mentioned our plans to walk. “Be careful of the dog off leash at the end of the street,” he advised. That translated into another dash inside to borrow a dog-deterring whistle my mother-in-law keeps on her at all times. 

The potential of dogs on the loose kept us alert as we picked our way around the beds of pickup trucks extended well beyond the driveway and around cracks in the sidewalk. When we decided to cross to the other side of the block, all five heads craned past the row of parked cars blocking our view before we zipped across. At the end of the (very short) block, we debated walking further, but terminating sidewalks eliminated any option other than to turn back. 

Everyone was restless, this was easy to see. Me, my baby, and the four teen girls now eagerly scanned Google Maps for a café within walking distance, but to no avail. Finally, I volunteered to drive them to one of the only walkable commercial areas in town: the Magnolia Silo Village, to which they eagerly agreed. That’s how we found ourselves cruising toward downtown, unloading the stroller 10 minutes later and walking around crowds of shoppers at the infamous Magnolia Silos. We angled for the café first. The line was long, so I offered to stand in line with the baby and order while the teens explored. Their eyes lit up at this suggestion and after they gave me their orders, they dashed off. 

I am not a huge fan of the Silos, but in that moment, I recognized this tiny microcosm of new urbanism as exactly what more young adults need in their neighborhoods and cities. Spaces where they can explore safely with each other, build memories, and flex their independence. Yet, too often, the future of our towns fail to take into account both what teens need from the city and what they can offer. In doing so, they overlook one of their most valuable assets: the next generation of potential residents. 

What do teens need from the city? 

Teens Need Room To Explore, Safely

The never-ending longing for independence is perhaps one of the most defining characteristics of this life stage. Teens need opportunities to explore the world around them independently, but currently, that opportunity is only available to those teens lucky enough to have a car and even then, they quickly discover that it’s really not all that. 

My husband has three older teenage children, the eldest of which has had a driver’s license and a car for almost a year. What started off as a triumphant phase of almost-adulthood has become quickly overshadowed by the burdensome realities of car ownership: the cost of gas, the cost of repairs, the expectation to get her siblings to school on time and worries about unsafe drivers on the road.

The initial thrill has worn off; the promise of freedom has been exposed as a myth. Driving for the average teen is not so much about exploring as it is about participating in a radical monopoly that reduces their participation in the outside world to driving safely and conserving gas. Teens deserve better than this. They deserve opportunities to explore their communities without the pressures of gas or the worries of avoiding a wreck. 

Cities that foster exploration are those with attractive public spaces, plenty of small businesses to patronize, public transit that connects to the wider area, and human-scaled streets conducive to wandering. This mode of design is a win for teens’ need to explore, and also for cities: teens that feel safe exploring their community are more likely to cultivate a sense of ownership. The city becomes less of a blur they drive through on their way to a destination; rather, it becomes the backdrop for their life story, a web of memories and connections that means something to them and that has a much greater chance at being seen as something to steward and care for. 

Teens Need Loose Social Ties, Too 

In addition to independence, teens crave meaningful social experiences. Watching the teenagers in our family circle, it amazes me how much energy goes into navigating various social situations and (hopefully) coming out of them in good standing with their peers. For teens, social connections, friendships, and social acceptance are essential to their sense of being in the world. What else do you think drives their dedication to their phones and TikTok trends but this desire to be “in” with their peers? 

This kind of social “keeping up” is normal for teens, but to transition to adulthood well, they need a more robust vision of what social participation looks like, and they can get that from communities designed for people, not for cars and consumerism. Waco is not a great example of this, but it is a small city and, as it pertains to this goal, that smallness helps.

A few months ago, I heard some older moms from church swapping stories about their teens’ growing-up years in Waco. Because Waco is relatively small, all of these moms found comfort in the high probability that their children would be seen by someone from church at some point during the week. They laughed about the times they had “caught” each other’s teen child veering off the expected path and either sent them home or reminded them of a family rule. 

These kinds of “run-in” moments might be temporarily embarrassing for young adults, but they’re important because they teach young people that being part of society is not just about having fun, keeping up with trends, and buying things; it’s about responsibly participating in society at large. Being part of a community means living up to particular duties, responsibilities, and expectations; it means contributing, not just consuming. It means interacting with people outside of your immediate circle.

This is much harder to facilitate these days with our communities increasingly fragmented and atomized. Our cities being designed according to the fast-paced, anti-social principles of “autotopia” makes it harder for all residents to be out and about and to see each other. It makes it harder for everyone to build those informal, loose social ties that give cities life, that transform neighborhoods into communities. 

This has especially unique consequences for young people: it means fewer chances for them to see in action the principles of respect, reciprocity, and conscientiousness that sustain public life. Designing for human visibility and for the development of meaningfully loose social ties (i.e., putting small businesses back into the neighborhood) could fix this. 

Teens Need Opportunities To Contribute

Part of what makes teen years so important (and dramatic) is the expectation we put on teenagers to begin to articulate how they plan to contribute as adults. Discussions about colleges, majors, and potential career paths become more frequent and more serious, especially during those last two years of high school. 

This might seem like a jump, but people-centric places can help with this process. These places tend to be walkable, moderately dense, amenable to small businesses, and so tend to be the kinds of places where young people can begin to foster the kinds of loose ties that might help them navigate their launch into adulthood. But more importantly, these places can provide young adults with opportunities to contribute in a meaningful way to their community and to the lives of their neighbors. These opportunities for service can, in turn, contribute to the career-planning process. 

Of course, plenty of teens living in rural or suburban environments are doing just fine mapping out their post-high school plans, so this isn’t to say that only those living in dense, walkable neighborhoods will be the ones successfully making the leap into adulthood. But I do think that how we design our communities has an impact on their imagination, on the roles they consider important and on the sphere of life they recognize as worth contributing to. How many young adults are likely to see value in pursuing more locally minded occupations like plumbing or repair work, running a daycare, or opening a great neighborhood diner? 

These are the kind of “everyday” businesses that keep communities running, yet they rarely land on the radar of graduating youth as worthwhile career paths. People-centric communities can help foster in young people a vision of successful adulthood that’s oriented around paying attention to the local level and taking pride in improving the lives of their neighbors. 

Teenagers are a sadly overlooked asset group in our communities. Reimagining the future of our communities with them in mind is a simple but powerful way to position our cities for long-term success, not just in terms of money, but in terms of their ability to inspire in the next generation a spirit of community care.

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