Malls Are Still A Perfect Hangout Spot For Teens

I loved being a kid in the ‘90s, and if there’s one thing about parenting that’s evergreen, it’s the absolute joy of reliving some of your favorite parts of childhood through your own kids’ eyes. While we aren’t parenting in the ‘90s, it’s been fairly easy to recreate a ‘90s childhood with our kids — especially because it’s so “trendy” now. There’s been a huge culture shift in more analog hobbies and giving our kids more independence like we had in the ‘90s, but there’s still one thing I’m hoping makes a full comeback: the mall as the perfect tween hangout.

Because even without all of the stores we had in 1995, it is.

Despite the many advancements we’ve made when it comes to understanding mental health — especially children’s and teens’ — it still feels impossible to find an entirely safe place for our young people to just be. Every day, there’s some TikTok or Instagram reel or Reddit rant bitching about how teens are too loud, how tweens are too rude, how little kids whine too much. Everyone seems quick to push teens and tweens out of spaces, and then turn around and complain how kids these days are being raised by their phones.

If you’d all just let your teens hang out at the mall again, I think we could right this ship.

Listen, I’m not telling you to drop them off at the first outlet store you see with $5 and a “Good luck!” But if you’re wishing your kid could have some of that same independence you did as a kid — if you’re wishing your kid could have an afternoon with their buddies that looks like a montage in a Disney Channel movie — then a mall is a really great place to start. It teaches them how to use money, it teaches them how to be respectful and speak up in public, it teaches them how to order food.

And it gives them the space they want to be on their own with friends, but not “unsafe.”

There are going to be people who argue that taking your kids to the mall and letting them walk around with their besties while you read a book in the food court with a slice from Great American Cookies is equal to dropping them off at a motel by the airport with a sign on their back that says FREE, PLEASE TAKE. But despite what your local Facebook mom group wants you to believe, most kidnappings and child abductions are not being done by a Middle Eastern man looking at his phone in front of Cinnabon. Most kidnappings and child abductions are a mixture of runaway children (often running from foster or state home care) and family/family acquaintance abductions.

Your child has a higher chance of being harmed while in the car on the way to the mall than being harmed inside the mall itself.

I know we don’t want to believe it, but the mall, with all of its shoppers and employees, can be a safe place. Your kids aren’t alone, wandering in and out of abandoned stores. They’re part of a community, part of the space, part of the public. And giving them this kind of opportunity matters.

The mall also offers kids the physical and mental opportunity to explore. How formative was it for all of us to wander into a Spencer’s Gifts and randomly see a poster of a practically naked Marilyn Manson on display? It felt safe to go into a store like Bath & Body Works and try out all of the new body spray samples so you can find your actual “scent.” You could pick up books you wondered about at Barnes & Noble, try on jeans your mom said no to at Abercrombie, and drink a chocolate milkshake for lunch.

At the mall, you can talk to your friends as you walk without anyone shushing you, and you can pick and choose what stores you want to go into.

The mall gives our tweens and teens some autonomy... the chance to discover themselves a little bit more. Maybe they always wanted to try on a push-up bra, and now they can. Maybe they still love a Lego set and want to look at them without anyone telling them they’re too expensive. Maybe they want to go into Hot Topic and figure out if fingerless gloves make them feel more like who they want to be.

You don’t have to let them be totally free like a bird. You can sit in the food court, lounge inside Barnes & Noble, or tell them to meet you parked at the bench outside JCPenney at 3 p.m. on the dot. They can still have their phone, and you can still track them, and yes, you can even give them $20 and tell them not to ask you for anything more.

Maybe it’ll feel scary to you. Maybe it’ll feel silly or overprotective or stupid or a million other things.

But I guarantee, as they walk off with their friends — “Stay together!” you can yell one more time — with nothing but time on their hands, they’ll feel nothing but freedom.