Nowhere to go but out

So, as established in the last post, there's not much room to stretch in The Netherlands.

This affects the communal psyche of the country in a bunch of ways, but one I noticed straight away is the number of kids (pre-teens and highschoolers) who hang out on the street at all hours of the day and night.

I wondered, like many Dutch people do, where are their parents?  Who is looking after these kids and wondering where they are at midnight on a Tuesday?  No wonder there's a problem with hooliganism in The Netherlands - the kids are running around with no supervision at all hours.

At some point I put my crotchety old woman hat in the bottom drawer and put my journalist hat where it should have been all along - on my head.

It seems to me that these kids (and their parents) just want a little space of their own.  At home, especially in poorer neighbourhoods, there's no room to grow or spread out.  If Mom or Dad is watching a show on TV, someone else is cooking dinner and your little sibling refuses to leave your shared bedroom...chances are you're looking for any escape.

I lived down the street from a skatepark - a common meeting place for the teenagers in the neighbourhood to get together and ... be teenagers.  It was loud sometimes and they weren't always super polite when I walked by, but after my little epiphany - and when I remembered I was only there for four months - I tried to cut them a little slack.

The problem is that, if you live in an area where kids are yelling at all hours of the night, playing music and trying to show off for their friends, then your patience may wear a little thin.  The other issue is that most kids who don't want to be at home but don't have anywhere else to go are immigrants and, in the Netherlands, you're automatically a trouble-maker if you come from Turkey, Morocco or Suriname.  Now, it's not only the immigrant kids who hang out on the street...but they're the ones who get the bad name.

And so it went that I was introduced to intolerance for newcomers in a country where they don't have much extra room.  I'll get into that in later posts but, if you want a little insight this right-wing party is getting more votes in every election.

xx
T