Every Child Needs a Third Place

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg called them third places — the settings that are neither home nor work. The café(kopitiam), the restaurant(the local mamak), the corner shop(mom/pop shop/local market). You aren’t assigned to one. You go because you want to, the same faces are there, and whatever status you carry outside doesn’t come in with you.

Oldenburg was writing about adults. But read that again and think about a twelve-year-old.

Most children in Kuala Lumpur don’t have one. They have home, which is the first place. School, which is the second. And tuition, which is really school again with a different ceiling. All of them are places where a child is measured, and all of them are places a child was put rather than chose.

What a third place gives a child

An identity that isn’t a grade. At school your child is a set of results and a position in a class. Somewhere else they get to be the one who never gives up, or the one who looks after the new kids. A child with only one arena to be judged in takes a bad result very hard. A child with two has somewhere to go on a bad week.

Friends they chose. School friendships are handed to you by a timetable and a postcode. The friendships in a third place come from a shared interest, which is why they cut across schools, ages and backgrounds — and why they often outlast the school ones.

Friends who aren’t the same age. School sorts children into a year group and keeps them there for a decade. A club doesn’t. A twelve-year-old could be training alongside a nine-year-old and or a seventeen-year-old, and picks up two things at once: how to be looked after, and how to look after somebody smaller. Neither is on any syllabus.

That turns out to matter long after childhood. Almost nobody spends their working life surrounded by people their own age. You end up managing someone twenty years your senior, or reporting to somebody half your age, and being comfortable with that is a real skill. Adults who only ever socialised inside their own year group often find it awkward. The ones who grew up in a mixed-age room don’t give it a second thought.

Adults who are neither parents nor teachers. Coaches aren’t marking your child and aren’t raising them, but they know them well enough to notice when they aren’t themselves. A coach can hold a child to a standard without any of the weight that comes from home.

And then the part that is hardest to put a value on. It keeps happening. Exams are bad, or home is tense, or a friendship at school has collapsed — and Wednesday evening comes around anyway, the same people are there, and for two hours none of it applies. Very few children could tell you that this is what they’re getting. Most of them feel it.

An activity is not automatically a third place

Plenty of children do three activities a week and don’t have one.

An activity is something you attend. A third place is something you belong to.

The test is simple. Does your child know the names of people there who aren’t in their own session? Do they want to arrive early and stay late? Would they notice if someone didn’t turn up? Have they been going long enough that there are newer children who look at them the way they once looked at somebody else?

What usually prevents it is optimisation. Changing every term to chase a better fit. Booking three things, nothing has room to become a habit. Arriving exactly on time and leaving immediately — when the twenty minutes either side is where most of the belonging is made.

What helps

Pick one and stay. Two years in one place will do more for a child than six months in four, even if the fourth is better run.

Let it be theirs. Don’t turn it into another place where performance is tracked and targets are set. The moment your child is performing for you there, it has become an extension of the first place.

Judge it by whether they want to go. Not by results, and not by how it sounds when you tell other parents about it.

What we’re actually trying to build

We teach fencing. That is why over a hundred children come through our doors, and we take it seriously.

But some of the most important things here have nothing to do with fencing.

We keep phones away as much as we can. It isn’t a popular rule and we enforce it anyway, because of what fills the gap. With nothing to look at, children talk to one another. They sit together between sessions and talk about school, about friendships, about a song they can’t stop playing. Some kids talk about the troubles, the difficult situations they face in school, at home. The third place alternative is another outlet. All of it happens in the open, in a busy hall, with coaches on the floor,

What we pay attention to is the tone of the room. In a club with mixed ages, the older ones set the standard whether they intend to or not. The younger ones copy how they warm up, how they lose, how they speak to a coach, how they treat someone weaker than themselves. Good old Asian values - courtesy, discipline and respect for your elders are required here.

There’s an old line that we become the average of the five people closest to us. Whether or not it holds up literally, every parent recognises what sits underneath it: your child will be shaped by whoever they spend their Wednesday evenings with. You cannot choose their friends. You can choose the rooms they stand in.

If your child already has a third place, protect it — even on the weeks when it’s inconvenient. If they don’t have one, it’s worth going to find it.