Let skateboarders roll, let kids be kids

It should be illegal for genetically clumsy old guys to ride perfectly good skateboards in lazy arcs across abandoned parking lots covered in glass bits and pebbles. The potential health care costs alone are catastrophic.

But that's the only thing about skateboarding that should be a crime.

As far as I can figure, Suffolk's municipal code is thankfully silent on skate rats, either ancient or new. It's the only one around here that is.

Skateboarding is illegal, to varying degrees, across Hampton Roads. In Norfolk, where the vice mayor himself is a skater, it's illegal all over the city, a fact that came up as officials continue to squabble over where to put a skate park. It's also a crime in Virginia Beach, Portsmouth and Chesapeake.

So, if I'm reading this right, city leaders in those places have decided that scarce police resources should be diverted to eradicate the blight that is poorly executed ollies on city streets. I can tell you right now that I'm in trouble, if I ever leave that parking lot.

Or perhaps the nannies might ease up a bit.

Some skaters are unquestionably jerks - the ones who damaged the Naval Aviation Monument Park near the Oceanfront spring to mind. Some dress weird, listen to noisy music and have little regard for the folks around them. But the same also can be said of politicians, and nobody has ever successfully outlawed them.

In fact, laws against skating have probably made it cooler than it would otherwise be (mark me Exhibit A) and even helped the sport attract a certain kind of anti-establishment type (Exhibit B).

I've now been through at least three waves of skateboarding popularity. The first - shortly after somebody figured out how to make wheels out of polyurethane - had just the slightest hint of West Coast rebellion when it got here. But skating was mostly a way to do stupid stuff on hills or in dry pools.

No parent ever considered outlawing it, not even when we were caught speeding down Linden Avenue, our ankles barely strong enough to keep the board from wobbling out from under us.

Something happened between now and then. Not to skateboarding; but to parents. I'd like to think I've given my kids a decent life so far, at least the best I can, but it's completely different from the one I led.

For huge patches of my childhood days, I was on my own. Walking to school, playing ball at the fields or in the street, panning for gold in the creek, feeding my brother dirt - my parents weren't around much. Not that they were absentee; they just never felt the compulsion to follow me around.

They weren't there to say "don't do that," or "do it this way" or any of the other things parents say when they believe they're helping but are actually sucking the fun out of life. Kids' play is so organized now that even skateboarding involves a parent and a specific facility. So does baseball. Searching for treasure, too.

If most parents can't actually be there all the time, we'll be sure rules and laws are. We'll ban skateboarding, for example, and force it into a park where we can keep an eye on it. We'll ban trespassing on public land. We'll give kids coaches.

The result of all this may be a more compliant culture and more serious children, but is that what anybody really wants?

In the past couple of years, I've spent a few days at my alma mater, talking with college students about their future. To a person, these folks are smarter, more polished and more ambitious than I have ever been. They are adults already, at a time of life when I couldn't find a clean T-shirt.

That's what we've gotten for all our parental hovering. But I wonder what we've lost by not giving kids room to goof around more. To play sandlot baseball. To win and lose without hearing about it from dad. To throw themselves across the asphalt after blowing a kick-flip.

At some point, as parents we've got to be willing to let kids be free to be kids. We've got to let them risk falling down, wobbling off their skateboard. No matter how hard it is for us as parents, no matter how scary, we've got to let them dare to fail so that one day they can succeed.

You go first.

Donald Luzzatto is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. E-mail him at donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.