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Substance Abuse
Skateboarding/the skateboarder crowd
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<blockquote data-quote="mrsammler" data-source="post: 433718"><p>I think it obviously varies from place to place and relies heavily upon how often adults are present there--the more adult presence, the less of a difficult child sinkhole it can become. Still, my late brother-in-law built a mini-skatepark in his spacious backyard to accommodate his budding difficult child's interest--a couple of big half-pipes brought in on 18-wheelers--and even with adults observing right there in the backyard, the tubes brought in all of the skateboard difficult child crowd and his son fell into their group and went down the tubes during teen years. I.e., best parental intentions (expensively accommodating a son's interest in an athletic activity) led the kid right into the worst teen crowd. You see something like that and it's hard not to blame the social culture of skateboarding itself, given how controlled and parent-observed the environment was. The lesson: it's not the park and what happens there--it's that the difficult children gravitate to skateboarding and find each other, and the social positive feedback loop kicks in. I am very wary of skateboarding as a primary social/athletic interest for teens because of this--if pot is a gateway drug (as it clearly is), skateboarding seems very much (to me) like a gateway social activity. YMMV, of course.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="mrsammler, post: 433718"] I think it obviously varies from place to place and relies heavily upon how often adults are present there--the more adult presence, the less of a difficult child sinkhole it can become. Still, my late brother-in-law built a mini-skatepark in his spacious backyard to accommodate his budding difficult child's interest--a couple of big half-pipes brought in on 18-wheelers--and even with adults observing right there in the backyard, the tubes brought in all of the skateboard difficult child crowd and his son fell into their group and went down the tubes during teen years. I.e., best parental intentions (expensively accommodating a son's interest in an athletic activity) led the kid right into the worst teen crowd. You see something like that and it's hard not to blame the social culture of skateboarding itself, given how controlled and parent-observed the environment was. The lesson: it's not the park and what happens there--it's that the difficult children gravitate to skateboarding and find each other, and the social positive feedback loop kicks in. I am very wary of skateboarding as a primary social/athletic interest for teens because of this--if pot is a gateway drug (as it clearly is), skateboarding seems very much (to me) like a gateway social activity. YMMV, of course. [/QUOTE]
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