Ad Hoc Tween Scooter Socials

Our neighborhood has a huge number of tweens between the ages of nine and eleven. Rita’s daughter Jasmine is nine and Rita’s son Gary is ten. Add to that Chloe who is ten and Veronica’s younger brother David who is eleven and at least four more kids within a short distance from our home. On any given day someone has at least one friend over after school to play.

Over the years people have moved in and moved out. Friendships have developed and gone stale and then developed again. This school year, there is a decided hub of tweens who choose to congregate after school in front of our house. It started with Chloe and Jasmine deciding to spend a lot of their time together on their scooters. They ride back and forth between our house and Rita’s house at the other end of the neighborhood. It didn’t take long before Chloe and Jasmine were getting more adventurous with their scooter riding, traveling together further out into the neighborhood.

With Chloe and Jasmine’s adventuring in safe numbers, others soon joined. Even boys began to join. But the neighborhood is only so big with a single exit leading out onto a major road headed out of town. By October of this school year the afternoons developed into ad hoc tween scooter socials in front of our house. The tweens would ride about seemingly aimless. They wouldn’t need to talk as long as they were focusing on their riding. But they were free to speak up to one another at any time. It was the perfect safe social environment for their developing social skills.

From my home office in the afternoon I can hear a clacking sound of scooters moving over the pavement. Occasionally, a tween or an older sibling will pull out a skateboard and join the scooter-riders. At times, Chloe will invite her friends behind our house to jump on the trampoline. If the crowd is large, they will sit around the edge of the trampoline and talk in a way not unlike her brother’s teenage friends talk. But eventually they run out of things to say. When they do, they either disperse or go back to riding scooters. In the end, it is usually Chloe and Jasmine who are the last ones riding. The enjoyed their ad hoc tween scooter social and then went back to their own private riding.