|
Kids spend summer days, nights at the mall Donavan Lavato lumbers through the food court in a cool teenage slouch, dressed head to toe in black and trailed by his 12-year-old brother. Donavan, 15, comes to the Chandler Fashion Center every day during the summer and usually spends more than 10 hours there. He has nothing else to do. As regular as Arizona's triple-digit temperatures, teenagers turn up at local malls on summer days, stretching across the week what is a Friday- and Saturday-night phenomenon the rest of the year. With hip-hop music spilling out of shops selling tiny tops and baggy shorts, shopping centers are social destinations for teenagers, filling the void of community centers and other hangouts for young people. They can people-watch, flirt, eat, see a movie and shop in air-conditioned comfort. There's no problem with that — as long as they behave. Across the country, shopping centers grapple with a summer surge of kids. For the most part, the children are well-behaved. The others security guards keep from gathering in large groups so they don't intimidate shoppers or make it hard to get to stores. The guards ask the kids to put away jump ropes, to get down off concrete planters and to pick up their trash. Please stop running. Please move along. Teens represent a powerful consumer group and potential employees, says Patrice Duker, spokeswoman for the International Council of Shopping Centers in New York. But mall officials also have to be mindful of their tenants and other shoppers and keep the kids' antics to a minimum. Dee Ross, senior property manager at Chandler Fashion Center, watches as hundreds of children flock to the mall on Friday and Saturday nights, gathering near the food court and the Harkins Theatres. Some children wave off their parents and head to the theater only to change direction and go into the mall as soon as their folks are gone. Ten security guards and four off-duty police officers patrol the mall on those nights. They stop kids from using foul language, they break up fights and they separate children making out in hallways. Some kids do things Ross suspects they wouldn't do if their parents were around. She urges parents to see the scene for themselves: “If they could just be here one evening and observe what happens, they wouldn't want their kids unsupervised in this situation.” At some malls, children hanging out unsupervised are younger (10 and 11) and they are staying longer. Kids used to be dropped off for two to three hours at a time and now they stay four to six hours, Ross says. “It is frightening,” Ross says. “You hear so much about children being abducted and disappearing.” A few shopping centers nationwide have adopted adult-supervision policies, requiring children to be accompanied by an adult after certain hours and on certain days. Of the nation's 1,130 enclosed malls, 16 have adopted such curfews. Two malls in Detroit implemented curfews this summer. The first to adopt a curfew was the Mall of America outside Minneapolis in 1996. Denise Hart, marketing director for Arizona Mills mall in Tempe, says mall officials looked into a curfew but decided against it. Hart says most teenagers come to the mall to see a movie, eat or shop. Duker says her organization has received a number of calls in the past year inquiring about the effectiveness of curfews. No Arizona mall officials say they are considering curfews. At Metrocenter on a Saturday night, Amber Noel, 16, checks her cellphone for messages. “We just come to hang out and see what parties are going on,” she says. Amber comes here every weekend, usually by bus, and meets friends. Her eyebrows shoot up at the idea of an adult-supervision policy. She can't imagine any adult would want to hover while she just hung out. “Oh, look at Ricky,” Amber says to her friends, Kristen Rosales, 15, and Salena Parrilla, 13, of Phoenix. “He got his hair braided. It's cute!” Kristen says there are few good places for teens to go. “All our friends hang out here.” About 50 teens sit at tables or outside on concrete planters. No one is doing anything wrong. In fact, no one seems to be doing much of anything. Kids need to socialize, but there are better places and more constructive ways to do it, says Annemarie Avanti, director of Arizona School-Age Coalition, a Phoenix non-profit that provides training for after-school programs. There are few good summer programs for youths ages 10 to 18, Avanti says, and specialty camps can be costly. In Arizona, 30 percent of children take care of themselves after school, according to the Afterschool Alliance, a national non-profit group. In summer, the number of kids age 10 or older who are home alone more than doubles. “We're wasting this very important time in these children's lives, thinking they're going to raise each other somewhere in a mall,” Avanti says. It's fine to let children go to the mall for a movie or to shop for a few hours but not all day and not day after day, Avanti says. Send them to community, church or parks programs, she says. Sammy Mustasa manages Coffee Society at the Ahwatukee Foothills Towne Center in Phoenix, named “best hangout for the 18-and-under crowd” by the Phoenix New Times this summer. Mustasa says there seems to be no limit on how long — or how late — kids can hang out. “They should be with their families,” he says.
|
