Colman Noctor: Teens are lonely and need spaces to hang out — A €100 culture voucher would help

"We say teenagers don’t meet in person because they are on their phones all the time, but maybe they are on their phones all the time because we don’t allow them to meet in person."

I was intrigued to hear about the proposal under consideration for Budget 2027, which would give every 16-year-old in Ireland a €100 voucher to spend on cinema tickets, concerts, theatre performances, and other cultural activities.

Personally, I would welcome the idea, although it is not entirely original as I am aware of similar schemes already operating elsewhere in Europe. France, Spain, and Italy have also introduced their own versions of cultural credits for young people.

There has been a mixed response to the proposal, largely centred on whether it is a good use of public funds. I guess it is easy to dismiss an initiative like this as a political gimmick but it is important to consider what I hope was the reasoning behind it.

I believe teenage loneliness is a real issue, and I have often voiced concerns that young people’s ability to organise their social world is diminishing. Whether that’s a consequence of covid lockdowns, screens, or societal change, it is undoubtedly an issue I see more and more.

As parents, we worry about how much time young people spend online and its impact on their mental health. But I think we spend far less time considering a more practical question, namely, where else teenagers can hang out.

We sometimes criticise teenagers for choosing to stay in their bedrooms and connect via Snapchat, gaming, or TikTok. However, if we want them to spend more time together in person, we need to ensure there are affordable, accessible, and socially welcoming places where they can do so.

A €100 cultural voucher may address one barrier to teenage socialisation, namely cost.

A trip to the cinema may not seem particularly significant to an adult. But for a group of 16-year-olds, the combined cost of transport, tickets, and perhaps popcorn and a drink can quickly add up to a significant expense.

But cost is not the only issue that I see.

While going to the cinema, a concert, or the theatre can give teenagers an opportunity to spend time together, I would describe these as ‘high-effort’ forms of socialisation that you wouldn’t be able to do every week. These ‘occasions’ require a certain amount of organisation: Someone has to suggest the idea, agree on a time and date when everyone is available, book the tickets, and arrange transport.

For a confident, assertive teenager with a secure friendship group, none of that may be especially difficult. But for a lonely or shy 15-year-old or 16-year-old, it can be too much.

One paradox of loneliness is that those who need social opportunities most often find it hardest to create them. Telling a lonely teenager to “meet up with friends” can be a little like telling someone who is struggling financially to simply earn more money. The solution requires the very thing they find most difficult.

Organising your own social life is a skill, and I wonder whether we have underestimated how difficult it can be for modern-day teenagers, because, like many previous generations, we learned how to do it by simply ‘hanging around’.

Adults quickly forget that an enormous amount of adolescent development happens while hanging around.

But, nowadays, teenagers’ ‘hanging around’ is often seen as a problem to be solved rather than an important developmental activity.

If you think about it, while we hung out together as teenagers, we chatted about all sorts of things, fell out and made up, shared stories, and teased one another.

None of this seems particularly productive.

But that may be precisely why it was so valuable.

Because we have begun to view the teenage years as an apprenticeship for adulthood, our teenagers spend much of their lives in highly structured environments. At school, there is a timetable and an educational purpose. At football training, there is a coach and drills. At dance, swimming, music, or grinds, another adult with another objective takes over.

While these adult-led, structured activities can provide valuable opportunities for friendship, social interaction is not their primary purpose. In fact, it can sometimes be actively discouraged. You are not supposed to chat during maths class, and at football training you are supposed to focus on the drills. Neither is a place where ‘shooting the breeze’ is encouraged.

Then we wonder why young people communicate with each other so much online. For many, it is their only adult-free space, which is developmentally essential.

Perhaps technology is not solely responsible for taking over young people’s social lives. In some ways, it may be meeting a social need we stopped facilitating.

We say teenagers don’t meet in person because they are on their phones all the time but maybe they are on their phones all the time because we don’t allow them to meet in person.

That is why the longer-term conversation about teenage connection probably needs to go beyond subsidising activities for young people and towards creating places where they can simply be together.

There are interesting examples elsewhere.

Looking elsewhere

Youth centres in Reykjavik operate after-school clubs into the evenings for children and teenagers, providing spaces for young people to meet and participate in social activities. In Finland, the ‘open youth-house’ model provides casual spaces where teenagers can spend afternoons and evenings together under the paid supervision of youth workers. These youth houses typically open from afternoon until around 9pm and are deliberately unstructured because they describe their purpose as providing somewhere young people can simply hang out.

The important distinction in these environments is that the adult is present but the adult does not determine the purpose.

When South Dublin County Council’s Teenspace programme consulted teenagers about what they wanted from public spaces, more than 90% reportedly wanted places for hanging out, play, and recreation. While teenagers can have a reputation for being demanding, these teenagers’ requests were remarkably ordinary. They wanted somewhere to sit and talk, shelter, wifi, toilets, music, and places to move around. We have become quite good at providing playgrounds for younger children and cafes and pubs for adults but adolescents are not catered for quite so well.

And when groups of teenagers congregate in shopping centres, parks, or outside shops, adults can quickly become uncomfortable with their presence.

We cannot simultaneously complain that teenagers spend too much time alone in their bedrooms and then complain when they gather in public.

What I think a lot of people don’t understand about friendship is the importance of frequency in contact.

The culture voucher proposal doesn’t account for the fact that friendships are rarely formed through one-off experiences. They are formed through repeated ordinary contact.

A concert might become a good experience among friends, but friendship itself is more likely to be built through hundreds of unremarkable micro-encounters like sitting beside someone, walking home together, taking the same bus, or being in the vicinity of others with opportunities for conversation.

That is why any conversation prompted by a cultural voucher should not end with the voucher itself.

The bigger challenge is infrastructural. Could the money be used to ensure every town in Ireland had a warm, safe space open several evenings each week for teenagers to hang out? Not another programme they have to enrol in or another structured activity.

Of course, there would need to be appropriate supervision and safeguarding but the purpose should be to interfere as little as possible with the social process itself.

The goal is not to entertain teenagers every minute but to enable them to learn to entertain each other.

The proposed culture card raises a valuable question about loneliness and access to experiences. But behind that lies an even more fundamental question about access to one another.

If we are genuinely concerned about teenage loneliness, we need to realise that the antidote to loneliness is connection.

Sometimes friendship and connection need a helping hand.

So perhaps one of the most useful things we, as adults, can provide for teenagers is not three free cinema trips a year or another organised activity, class, or programme but a safe, warm, indoor place, with some comfortable chairs and enough time to sit together and let connection happen.