Streeter: It’s summer in Baltimore. Do you know where your kids are?

“It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?”

This PSA, which ran on television from the late 1960s to the late ’80s, is a peculiarly appropriate relic of famously feral Gen X childhoods. It was a reminder for our parents to make sure us free-range kids, who didn’t have cellphones and AirTags, were home and not wandering the barren cityscape riding rusty boxcars and blowing up glass aspirin bottles with Pop Rocks.

We don’t have those ads anymore, but there remains, even with the benefit of technology, the responsibility to know the whereabouts of our children, especially in the summer. There is proof in the events of the weekend before last, when dozens of kids fought at AFRAM and hundreds congregated en masse in Fells Point, resulting in festival age restrictions and a crowd dispersal order, respectively.

I am a Baltimore mom who believes in the role of the village to raise strong, responsible children. I also know the responsibility lies largely with parents and that the village sometimes has a reason to be suspicious. There is no good reason for young ones to be out past curfew, but you have to admit that groups of Black and brown kids get hassled in broad daylight, too.

All I know is we have a problem with what to do with our kids, and it’s on all of us to figure it out.

For those who might say, “Girl, watch your own kid!” — I do! I’m just also aware that my Black son is assumed to be a suspect the minute he leaves the house, especially if he’s with friends. It’s not fair. But I know that’s beside the point.

“There’s a way you have to move in the world. With these issues, we don’t have time for fair. We deserve fair,” said the Rev. Julian Fuller, the pastor of New Hope Baptist Church, a Morgan State University lecturer in math, former Baltimore City Public Schools teacher and the father of two adult sons. “But I don’t want to go downtown to identify whatever is under that sheet. So you’ve got to move smarter than this.”

As much as I want to believe everyone, including teenagers, will hew to their better nature if given the chance, I know that’s not true.

“When you come down the street with six friends with a ski mask on, you’re going to be responded to,” Fuller said. “No one’s taking the time in that moment to ask, ‘Does he have a mom working the swing shift tonight? Has he had dinner today?’ Particularly for the melanated crew, we know people aren’t going through that checklist.”

There’s always a question of what to do with kids in the summer to keep them occupied. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and his team at the Department of Recreation and Parks have created a program called Bmore This Summer, with opportunities and activities for youth that stretch into the late night. That’s a good thing.

But there are those who cannot or simply don’t want to take advantage of those things. Fuller and educator Meredith Davis — director of the first Upward Bound program that housed kids at Coppin State University for six weeks for skills training and college tours — believe there’s a disconnect between who we think today’s kids and their parents are and the reality.

“I think that what is being missed is that their [teens’] behavior is our avoidance to socializing them and providing spaces for them,” Davis said. “We have to be teaching them how to engage in public and how to socialize with people their age.”

Much has been made of the intersection of technology and COVID isolation that created a generation that doesn’t feel comfortable with interpersonal relationships or, as our parents would have said, knowing how to act. And maybe it’s that no one told them.

“Your choices are only as good as your options for a lot of our kids. And they are not given options. Why are we mad at a 13-year-old?” Davis said. “Be mad at the parents and the system that has no place for them to go.”

I asked Davis if modern children were socialized badly, and she very gently but emphatically corrected me. “This generation is more individualistic. They were socialized differently,” she said.

Fuller agrees there is a culture difference between kids today and their parents. But he’s a lot more stark about how we have to parse those differences realistically. “Yes, we were, at times, in our foolishness,” he said of his generation, “but we were into that foolishness in direct opposition to the instruction we had gotten.”

Because of the general increased cost of the world, he’s also not sure parents these days are as available as ours were — and remember, we were the latchkey, drinking-from-the-hose kids!

“There was a time when I would think, ‘I know somebody taught you better than that,’ but I can’t assume that anymore,” Fuller said.

That brings me back to my gooey liquid heart center, where I want to protect all the babies, whether they are doing anything or not. Fuller told me a heartbreaking story about how his younger son, then a member of Morgan’s cross country team, wore dark clothes for an evening run against his father’s advice. Unfortunately, it was the same night the nearby Subway sandwich shop was robbed.

“And here’s this kid, with A’s in every class, sort of fits the description, and here I am, a teacher at Morgan, with my son handcuffed in front of me on my porch,” Fuller said. This story ended with his son safe but not unshaken. Aware that his fate is based not only on his own actions but circumstances he can’t control.

“A whole lot of Black kids are taken out doing absolutely nothing wrong. I want to, at least, decrease the chances,” Fuller said.

It’s not fair. And, as an American, I think my kid should have the right to roam his city at the appropriate time and with adherence to rules. But I know those rules are mine to enforce.

We need to know where our children are.