By Alfie Spring, 17
Being a teenager is difficult. It’s the boundary between childhood and adult responsibilities, where you find yourself too old to participate in the things you used to love but too young to be allowed to move on and find something new and grown up.
Have you ever seen a group of teenagers in a children’s play park and thought ‘they shouldn’t be there’? I am a teenager and I still think that. As much as I enjoy running around, climbing on things that probably shouldn’t be climbed on and whizzing down slides that definitely don’t hold my weight, if I do go to the park to do it I’ll see a small child waiting for their turn and think ‘should I be here, disrupting their peaceful and innocent fun?’
So I leave the park and sit on the grass with my friends, trying to think what we can do next. We would love to go to the cinema but that’s not within walking distance and also costs money. Mini-golf? The same applies. We could walk down the high street looking at the shops but it’ll only be a matter of time before we’re politely asked to leave (we can be a bit loud) and end up going round to someone’s house, sitting on our phones and doing nothing.
The phrase ‘things to do for teenagers near me’ on Google is interpreted more as things to do with teenagers as opposed to things for teenagers. The locations and prices of these activities seem to assume there is an accompanying adult; the nearest result was a (fairly reasonable) 32-minute walk but cost upwards of £15 per person. This may be fine for a one-off but is not regularly sustainable.
After changing the word ‘teenagers’ to ‘children’, I was immediately hit with a number of free activities within 10-15 minutes’ walking distance. Even places with a price attached were far lower, at around £5-10. Considering it’s not unreasonable to expect both the parent/guardian of the child to be paying for the activity and for that parent/guardian to be in a better financial position than a teenager in full-time education, I find this curious.
When asked to think of an activity they could do, an assortment of my friends responded ‘nothing’s free, things like paintball and Airsoft (a team-based shooting game) are expensive’ and another in response agreed, adding ‘you can’t start new activities as a teen’.
That isn’t to say that the lack of things for teenagers to do has gone completely unnoticed. A big push to counter it comes from youth clubs such as the Lingfield Youth Hub, which provides a safe space for young people to hang out and food for just £1 on Wednesday evenings. It was set up by resident Bernadette Chipp-Smith and Rev. Ian Whitely for exactly this reason.
While projects like this are fantastic and should be templates for other areas, they have two drawbacks. One, they don’t typically run on weekends, and teenagers need something to do then too, when there isn’t school filling their time. There is obviously a need for projects during the week but the weekends would benefit massively from this too. Secondly, these clubs run at set times, which can be completely at odds with the spontaneous nature of a teenage hang-out. It’s great if you can plan meetups in advance, but this doesn’t often happen and so places are needed whenever and wherever.
In the end, I get it. Even as a teenager I’m still terrified when I see a large group of people my own age walking down the street but really, I needn’t be. They’re just trying to find fun in a limited field and I hope, in the future, that field can greatly expand.
