When the final bell rings, Walter Johnson High School students no longer flock to Westfield Montgomery Mall. Instead of studying, shopping and snacking after school, teenagers all over Montgomery County are making new plans after one of their favorite hangouts no longer wants them there.
The afternoon behavior shift in teens comes after a new Westfield Mall policy for both the Wheaton and Montgomery malls, which restricts those younger than 17 from entering the mall after 3:00 p.m. without a guardian who is 21 or older. There may not be more than four minors to one adult.
The decision stems from several past instances of violence in both malls, including a shooting, a stabbing, fights, shoplifting, burglaries and assaults. Teens who work at retail stores in the malls are exempt from the policy.
The new Westfield policy is part of a larger movement across malls nationwide where unaccompanied minors have limited access to malls on certain days or times. According to the National Youth Rights Association, over 1,000 malls and shopping centers across the U.S. have banned those under 18 in some capacity, and the number has grown more over the last decade.
While the Montgomery Mall media team responded to an interview request saying they were not scheduling interviews regarding the policy at this time, they reiterated their statement that “the policy was implemented to ensure a safe, welcoming, and enjoyable environment for all guests, retailers, and community members.”
Walter Johnson senior Danielle Azarad, 17, explained an economic issue stemming from the “teen ban,” the phrase high school students have adopted to refer to the policy. She pointed out that teens will lose “the independence of buying stuff with your own money, without having to always be with your parents. I think it’s very important to someone’s development.”
Azarad credits the mall as the place where she learned how to budget. “You learn to limit yourself and prioritize what you want in the moment, and think about the future, knowing, ‘I want this later.’ So I’m going to save up the money instead of buying something small now,” she said.
This idea is shared by Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School junior Julia Reitz who worries about how younger teens will learn these lessons. “It’s much easier nowadays to go online and spend as much money as you want, and you can’t really tell how much money you’re spending because there are shipping costs that you’re not aware of or stuff like that. So I feel like younger generations might not learn the weight of what they’re buying,” she said.
According to the U.S. Census, online shopping currently accounts for 17.1% of total retail sales in the U.S., and research from Statistica indicates that 95% of Gen-Z has purchased something online in the last year. As malls nationwide increasingly place restrictions on the times that teenagers can visit the mall unsupervised, it is likely that the volume of online shopping will continue to grow amongst the younger Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha cohort.
Reitz sees this policy as a restriction on an important third-space, a social environment separate from your home and your school where someone can relax, unwind and socialize. As a hockey player, Reitz’s third space is the Rockville Ice Arena because it “really feels like a home too,” she said.
It’s common for teens who play sports to feel that their third-spaces are their fields, arenas, pools, courts or other athletic spaces. For Bethesda Chevy Chase Senior Kyra Schachter, a recruited field-hockey player, a third space is the field. “I play field hockey and I go a lot, especially when the weather’s decent, to just our school field or to local ones in the area,” Schachter said.
However, there are teens who do not participate in sports or do not feel comfortable in an athletic setting. Azarad explained that for many Walter Johnson teens in all grade levels, their proximity to the mall meant that some teens used to visit the mall “almost every day, if not every other day.”
For some, the mall was “a place to hang out when being at home wasn’t an option,” Azarad said.
Schachter and Reitz reiterated this point with frustration. “The mall was a great third space for people. Adults are always saying, ‘go out into the world, get off your devices, go be with people’, but it feels like ‘don’t be in these places where you can actually do that,’” Schachter said.
Her point is echoed by Reitz. “Adults are always complaining about how teens always stay in the house or we’re never seeing our friends. We just go on our phones, but then they continuously restrict us from going to these places. There’s almost no places that a teen can safely go nowadays,” Reitz said.
The students also had different potential solutions to replace the current policy. While beliefs are held that community building, safety initiatives and school-wide messaging needs to take the lead, Reitz believes in an infrastructural approach. “They could put metal detectors at the front door or increase security,” she said.
Where will students go now? Schachter, Azarad and Reitz are unsure, but they suspect that some will end up in places where they can cause much more trouble than the food court of a mall.
“There’s going to be more and more people inside these spaces that aren’t designed to support them, which will lead to problems, which will lead to more of the spaces getting shut down, and it’ll continue the cycle,” Schachter said.
Reitz agrees. “It may spark more violence among teens in the community because there’s nothing else to do other than fight or stay at home,” she said.
Written by Mia Strollo
Graphic by Oviyaa Ramesh