Sometimes I watch my daughter carefully arrange her nature treasures on our kitchen table—acorns sorted by size, leaves by color—and something catches in my throat. Not because it’s particularly precious (though it is), but because I realize she’ll never know what it felt like to disappear for entire afternoons with the neighborhood kids, coming home only when the streetlights flickered on.
Last week, she asked me if we could schedule a playdate with her friend from preschool. Schedule. At five years old, she already knows that seeing friends requires coordination, calendar checking, and driving across town. When I was her age in my small Midwest town, I just walked next door.
This isn’t about nostalgia making everything seem better than it was. And I’m definitely not saying my childhood was perfect—my parents had their own traditional, somewhat strict approach that I’ve consciously chosen to soften with my own kids. But there’s this growing awareness that the world my children are inheriting is fundamentally different from the one that shaped me, and I’m still figuring out what that means for how I parent them.
The neighborhood that no longer exists
Remember when “go play outside” meant joining the automatic game of whatever was happening on your street? That whole ecosystem doesn’t exist for my kids. Even in our family-friendly neighborhood, children don’t roam in packs anymore. They’re either in structured activities, on scheduled playdates, or inside their own homes.
I try to recreate some of that freedom in our backyard, letting them get gloriously muddy and make up their own games. But it’s not the same as having a whole crew of kids creating elaborate worlds that spanned three backyards and lasted all summer. My son builds his couch cushion forts alone or with his sister, not with the five other kids who would have been automatic playmates in 1985.
What breaks my heart a little? They don’t know what they’re missing. This is their normal—the careful orchestration of social time, the adult supervision, the planned activities. They don’t know that childhood friendships once formed organically over shared geography rather than shared schedules.
When boredom was a gift we didn’t know we had
“I’m bored” used to be the starting point of adventure. Now it feels like an emergency to solve. Even though we’re a low-screen family, the expectation of constant engagement runs deep in our culture. My kids have never experienced the kind of deep, stretched-out boredom that used to push us into creativity or mischief or both.
I watched my daughter the other day, standing in our art corner with all her supplies in those recycled jars, and she asked me what she should make. When I suggested she figure it out herself, she seemed genuinely stuck. At her age, I would have been three hours into some elaborate project involving every cardboard box in the garage, mostly because there was literally nothing else to do.
We try to hold space for unstructured time, but even that feels scheduled—”free play” as an agenda item rather than the default state of childhood. Saturday mornings when Matt makes pancakes, we let them ramble and play without direction, but there’s always this underlying current of available alternatives. They know screens exist. They know classes and activities exist. The boredom never gets deep enough to become transformative.
Information everywhere and innocence nowhere
My children will never know what it’s like to not know something and have that be okay. Every question has an immediate answer. Every curiosity can be instantly satisfied. They’ll never experience the weeks-long debate about whether dolphins are fish or mammals, finally resolved by a library book.
But more than that, they’re growing up in a world where information—often frightening, complex information—finds them whether I want it to or not. Despite our best efforts to preserve their childhood, awareness seeps in. My daughter knows about things I didn’t know existed until middle school. Not because we told her, but because the world is louder now, more insistent.
How do you preserve wonder when everything is explainable? How do you protect innocence when information has no boundaries? These are questions I don’t have clean answers for, just daily negotiations and judgment calls.
The weight of being their everything
Here’s what really gets me: I am my children’s primary playmate, entertainer, teacher, and companion in a way my parents never were. Not because I’m a better parent—honestly, I think I might be overdoing it—but because the village that raised me doesn’t exist for them.
Growing up, I learned from dozens of adults. The neighbor who taught me to garden, the older kids who showed me how to ride a bike, the various parents who each had different rules and expectations. My kids have me and Matt, their teachers, and a handful of carefully vetted caregivers. Their world is smaller and more curated.
Sometimes I wonder if my constant availability is actually doing them a disservice. They don’t develop the same resourcefulness when Mom is always there to engage with, to problem-solve with, to turn to. Connection over perfection is my parenting philosophy, but what if all this connection is preventing them from developing their own internal resources?
Finding our way forward
So what do I do with this slow realization? I can’t recreate the past, and honestly, I wouldn’t want to wholesale. That world had its own problems—less awareness, fewer options, plenty of kids who fell through bigger cracks.
Instead, I’m trying to be intentional about pulling forward what was valuable while accepting what’s changed. We walk to the farmers’ market not just for the produce but for the practice of moving through the world at foot speed. We know our immediate neighbors by name and share our garden abundance. I send the kids outside with vague instructions and resist the urge to supervise.
Most importantly, I’m learning to grieve what’s lost without getting stuck there. Yes, my children will never know the world I grew up in. But they’re growing up in their own world, and my job is to help them navigate it with strength and joy, not to make them nostalgic for something they never experienced.
Some days I nail this balance. Other days I find myself saying “When I was your age…” and catching myself mid-sentence. They don’t need my comparison; they need my presence in their reality.
The truth about moving forward
Maybe the slow realization isn’t really about what my children won’t know. Maybe it’s about accepting that parenting them requires me to let go of my own childhood as the reference point. Their challenges will be different. Their joys will be different. Their memories will be completely their own.
When my daughter sorts her leaves and asks if we can invite her friend over tomorrow, I say yes. We’ll check our calendars, send a text, make it happen. This is her childhood—scheduled and supervised, perhaps, but also full of intention and connection. When my son builds his fort, I resist the urge to tell him about the elaborate ones we used to build. His fort is perfect because it’s his.
The world I grew up in is gone. The world they’re growing up in is here. And somewhere between grieving what was and embracing what is, we’re finding our way.
