No Childhood? Or Is It Just a Change?
“BACK IN MY DAYS…”
Every generation looks back with nostalgia, believing that their way of growing up was the “real” childhood. Parents tend to assume that kids today are slowly losing that so-called childhood, since the way of having fun is completely different from what they once knew. But the truth is, childhood has never actually disappeared –it just shifts its shape to fit each new generation. What seems odd or even wrong to one age group eventually becomes the ordinary way of life for the next.
Our grandparents grew up with books, stories, and long hours of study. They treasured evenings spent reading under lamp lights or listening to folk tales told by elders. To them, patience, discipline, and imagination were what gave childhood its meaning. So when they saw their children –our parents –playing outside, chasing balls across yards, or running in the rain with friends and coming home with muddy feet, the grandparents sighed in disapproval, complaining that their children didn’t care about learning. “Back in my days,…”, they would say. Still, what grandparents considered noisy and careless, eventually became the very memories that parents now cherish most: the laughter echoing in the neighborhood, the friendships formed through shared games.
Then came our parents. To them, childhood without outdoor activities seemed incomplete. Meanwhile, it is common for youths nowadays to spend much of their time on electronic devices indoors. Quite the opposite, parents valued fresh air, physical play, and carefree afternoons until sunset. And as they grew older and watched us grow up, their tone changed. They looked at us sitting indoors, fixing our eyes on glowing screens, fingers moving quickly over tablets or phones, and felt uneasy, thinking, “How can you call this ‘play’, back in my days…”. Maybe they thought we seemed to be trapped behind the screen, along with our energy. What they did not see, perhaps, was that we were also laughing, building friendships, and exploring worlds –just not in the same form. Although it was still a shared game, a late-night chat, or creating something digital together.
And one day, it will be our turn. We will remember our own childhood through the glowing phones and tablets, the excitement of online games, or the warmth of video calls with friends at night. To us, those moments were crucial parts of growing up, but our children may live in an entirely different world. With advancing technology, our children’s play will no longer be limited to flat screens, but will shift into virtual worlds. Their toys might not be plastic, but robots that laugh, talk, and even teach. Instead of video calls, they could summon a hologram of a friend standing right there in the room, no longer regular face calls that we had in the “past”, even planting trees or feeding pets could be done in a digital garden, tended by artificial intelligence. And what would we say while watching them do all of this? “This isn’t real childhood. Back in my days…”. Probably.
Yet in the end, every generation’s play is simply reshaped. So no matter if it is reading books under oil lamp lights, playing outside, playing online games, or even having a robot friend, it can be called “childhood” as long as everyone had such memorable experiences.
In conclusion, it is best just to let kids enjoy their moments, making them part of their childhood. Excessive restrictions cannot prevent children from embracing today’s digital reality.
AL Nguyen