From dirt bikes to Pier Village — NJ has a parent problem

I was on my way home from the grocery store yesterday when I had to hit my brakes.

Two kids on gas-powered dirt bikes — no plates, no helmets, no licenses — blew through a three-way stop like the sign wasn't there. One of them had a girl on the back. The kid on the second bike looked back at his friend, then looked at me and shook his head. He knew. He knew exactly what his friend had just done. And they kept going.

I wasn't angry at the kids. I was angry at whoever handed a teenager a gas-powered motorcycle and apparently said nothing else after that.

About two hours later, Pier Village in Long Branch needed a countywide police response and an 8 p.m. curfew because a pop-up beach party turned into teenagers jumping on cars and fighting in the streets. NJ Transit's Coast Line ran 30 minutes late. And Seaside Heights — which saw this coming weeks ago — has already requested FBI support, Homeland Security agents, mounted State Police and drone teams for Memorial Day weekend.

Same week. Same story. Different zip codes.

Has it always been like this — or did something change?

Here is the question worth asking honestly: is this new, or does it just feel new?

The answer is both.

Teenagers have always pushed limits. Drag racing on Route 9. Fights behind the mall. Drinking in the woods. Vandalism on Halloween. None of that is new and anyone who pretends otherwise is misremembering their own youth. I am not pretending I never did anything stupid at 16.

But something has changed — and it is not the teenagers. It is the environment around them.

Decades ago bad behavior happened and then it disappeared. It did not get filmed, posted, shared ten thousand times and turned into a status symbol. Social media has done something specific and damaging to teenage risk calculation: it made chaos worth something. A dirt bike popping a wheelie through a stop sign used to get you grounded. Now it gets you followers. A pop-up party that turns violent used to end careers and reputations. Now it gets you on the news in a way that some kids find appealing rather than shameful.

The audience changed what the behavior means.

SEE ALSO: Fighting, cars jumped, curfew at 8 — and it's not even MDW yet 

The adults in the room stopped showing up

There is something else happening that nobody wants to say out loud. The adults have left the building — not all of them, but enough of them that the kids noticed.

Teachers who intervene risk being filmed and going viral. Police who respond to juvenile situations face legal constraints and public scrutiny that did not exist a generation ago. Business owners who confront shoplifters or troublemakers face the same calculation. Even parents hesitate — because every confrontation now has the potential to become a lawsuit, a social media pile-on, or a two-minute clip stripped of all context.

The result is a vacuum. And teenagers — who are biologically wired to test the boundaries of whatever environment they are in — will fill a vacuum every time.

Two working parents, economic stress, stretched thin from every direction — I am not here to blame parents who are doing their best in a genuinely difficult situation. But somewhere in the last twenty years the cultural expectation that adults supervise, confront and set consequences for young people quietly eroded. And now we are surprised when the kids act like there are no consequences.

What Seaside Heights figured out that Long Branch learned the hard way

Seaside Heights Police Chief Tommy Boyd saw this coming. Six pop-up parties were already being promoted on TikTok targeting Seaside for Memorial Day weekend and he did not wait — he called in reinforcements, sent cease-and-desist letters to organizers and got the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office involved before a single tent went up.

Long Branch got the Tuesday version of what Seaside is trying to prevent on Sunday.

The difference between the two is not luck. It is preparation, consequences and the willingness to treat this as a serious public safety issue rather than an inconvenient seasonal problem. An 8 p.m. curfew is a reaction. What Seaside is doing is an anticipation.

This is not a Shore problem — it's everywhere

The dirt bikes in my neighborhood are not a Shore story. They are a New Jersey story. They are happening in suburbs, in cities, in rural South Jersey towns where the roads go long and straight and nobody is watching. Gas-powered, unregistered, unplated, unlicensed — on public roads in the middle of the afternoon with passengers on the back and not a consequence in sight.

The group mentality makes it worse every time. One kid does something dumb and two hundred kids follow the energy. It was true at Pier Village Tuesday night. It is true at every intersection where a dirt bike runs a stop sign and the kid behind him shakes his head but keeps going anyway.

That second kid knew it was wrong. He just didn't have a reason to stop.

That is the problem. And it did not start at the Shore.