I was born in 1978. My son was born in 2011. That's a 33 year gap, long enough that when I showed him a rotary phone last month, he stared at it like it was a museum artifact. We passed the same living room, but we did not pass through the same world. Here's what I notice comparing his childhood to mine. The things I miss, the things I don't, and the things I'm genuinely glad he never had to deal with.
Outside Was the Default
When I was seven, my parents shoved me out the front door at nine in the morning with a granola bar and the instruction “be home when the streetlights come on.” I biked two miles to a friend's house, played street hockey in the cul-de-sac, climbed a tree fort that absolutely was not up to code, and showed up at dinner with a scraped knee and a new word I'd invented.
My son has been outside for unstructured play maybe a handful of times this past year. When he does go, it's a scheduled playdate with another supervised kid. We text him to come in. If he doesn't reply in twelve minutes, one of us quietly walks outside. I get it. The world is different. I just wish it weren't.
The Way We Were Entertained
My entertainment stack as a kid included one TV in the living room, 4 channels, no remote. If I wanted to watch The Smurfs, I had two chances, at 8:30am on Saturday morning or never. I learned to live around the broadcast schedule.
My Walkman was my personal theater, podcast, and music library rolled into one. I rewound tapes with a pencil. I had a poster of Optimus Prime on my door and I learned the lyrics to entire albums by holding the recorder up to the family TV when MTV came on. (Look it up, kids.)
His entertainment stack: an iPad, a smart TV, a Xbox, two gaming PCs, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, and Disney+. He can watch literally anything he wants, instantly, queued from another room.
Honestly, I'm jealous.
The Way We Learned
I used a card catalog at the public library. Encyclopedias were three hundred dollars, so we owned the set my uncle gave us. Volumes A through M, missing the entire letter N. If it wasn't in the encyclopedia, it didn't exist. If it was, it was at least five years out of date.
My son has Google on a device that fits in his pocket, asks Siri questions out loud, and watches a 12 year old explain quantum mechanics on YouTube in twelve minutes. He understands things I am never going to understand.
The strange part: I'm not sure he's more curious than I was. He's just satisfied faster.
The Way We Stayed Friends
My friendships were physical. We rode bikes to each other's houses. We had one shared landline, and three way calls required a specific choreography between our moms. If you argued, you saw the friend the next day and worked it out, or didn't, but you still saw them at lunch.
His friendships are mostly digital. He talks to his friends every day on Facetime or over the Xbox. They play Roblox together, send memes, share screens. When he argues with one, they unfollow each other and a friendship that mattered is just… over.
Both of those hurt. Just in different ways.
What I'd Give Him If I Could
If I could hand him one thing from my childhood, it would be the boredom. Real boredom — the kind where you had nothing to do and had to invent something. Boredom was where my imagination came from. I built entire civilizations out of sticks in the backyard.
If I could take one thing from his childhood, it might be the 24/7 connectivity. The pressure to be always on, always responsive, always cool. I want to give him a pocket in the woods with no signal.
I'm not nostalgic in a way that thinks my era was better. We had our messes like second hand smoke at the restaurant, drunk driving treated as a punchline, lead paint we didn't think twice about. His era has its own mess with phones in hands, attention spans that won't sit still, loneliness even inside a group chat, and an online world I can't always see.
What I want for him isn't my childhood. That's gone. What I want for him is to be able to look back on these years and feel like they were his. Bikes and Wi-Fi. Friendships across a screen and across a yard. The right amount of boredom to dream a little, and the right amount of adventure to find it.
Maybe the best part of being a parent in two eras at once is I can tell him what I remember, and he can tell me what's coming. We get to learn from each other. If he ever has a kid, that kid will probably be born around 2037. I have no idea what their childhood will look like. But I bet, I will be sitting at a kitchen table, telling them about their dad's iPad like it was a relic.
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