Do kids these days have it easier?
“Do you think you had a better childhood without the cell phones, tablets and social media that our younger generations have today?”
That’s a pretty deep question, and I’ll admit that when this graphic recently popped up in my Facebook feed, it caused me to pause and think about what it was asking. My first instinct, as it may have been for the countless number of other people who saw the same post, was to answer in the affirmative.
Yes, I thought, indeed I did have a better childhood without all the electronic gadgets and gizmos than younger people have today, but then I found myself second-guessing my answer. Us senior folk always seem to lament about the younger generations and their new-fangled technologies, much of which some of us don’t even understand, but is that really fair?
Think about it. Did people of my age (I’m almost 60) really have a better childhood or was it just different from what younger generations experience today?
I would speculate that most people in my generation would argue that we had it better and would agree with that observation on many levels. For one thing, people like me who grew up 60 years ago were often left to our own devices to come up with games and activities to keep us occupied instead of relying on technology to fill our spare time.
We didn’t have electronic devices that could keep us entertained for hours, nor did we have hand-held gadgets that we could take with us anywhere we went to keep us distracted. Instead, we had to rely on our own ingenuity and that of our friends to keep us busy.
Furthermore, some would argue that people from my generation also spent more time outside playing with our friends than inside the house glued to a computer screen, which made us more active and, as result, more healthy. I would generally concur with that sentiment. As children, we proudly point out, we spent many hours outside in the fresh air, playing tag, hide and seek, kick the can and a long list of other activities. And we did it no matter the season.
Given the chance, people from my generation wax poetic about how great it was to grow up in a time when children talked to one another and played with each other in person, rather than being linked by a Wi-fi through their devices as most young people are today. And while I would also agree with that point, I would also note that interacting face-to-face wasn’t always what it was cracked up to be.
There were certainly lots of good times to be had while playing outside with our friends, but there were also many rough times where we didn’t always get along. I guess if we learned anything from these early scraps it was that we figured out how to resolve our differences and come to terms with whatever caused the strife in the first place. That’s a life skill that you can’t learn in front of a screen.
We learned a great deal from playing outside with our friends, but our childhoods weren’t all about play. It was the step toward maturity and adulthood. The good times and the bad times were part of growing up, and I have often thought that I wouldn’t trade my childhood for that experienced by younger generations.
Now, I am not dismissing any of the modern technologies that appear, on the surface, to have given younger generations opportunities that we couldn’t even imagine when we were children. In truth, I often cringe when I hear someone say that today’s younger generation have it so much easier than the generations that came before them.
I think, do they? Do they really?
I would argue that while they have a different experience than we had, I would also point out that they don’t have it easier.
As the father of two young men who grew up in the midst of the electronic explosion, I would agree that our children had so many different experiences than I had as a kid, that I can’t even compare my childhood to what they went through. There really is no way to draw a correlation because it was a different time and a different era.
It’s like saying oranges are better than apples even though they are totally different. And to say which is better depends entirely on one’s personal perspective and individual tastes.
Regardless of what devices we provided our children, however, I would never say they had it easier than I did as a child. In fact, this modern era of mass and instant communication where you can connect with someone else in the blink of an eye no matter where they are in the world opens up a list of opportunities and challenges that we could never have imagined when we were youngsters.
Sometimes, for people of my generation and older, it’s hard to wrap our heads around just how much things have changed. It’s mind numbing.
But it hasn’t always made life easier for the younger generations as this new technology has come with its own issues, including cyber bullying and peer pressure. Then there are the financial pressures that many parents experience when they can’t provide their children with the same devices that other children may have.
These challenges are real for many people, so while I would agree the lives of younger generations have changed over the decades, I would not agree that their childhoods are better.
Every senior generation laments about the younger generations coming up behind them. It’s the natural order of evolution. I recall many times when my parents would say something like “when we were kids” or “you kids have it so easy today.” Or how about this gem: “Kids today don’t know what hard work is.”
Kind of sounds like something people from my generation might say to a young person today, don’t you think?
It’s easy to make a blanket statement like young people have it so much better today than we had it when we are kids, but unless you’re in that moment with those youngsters, you can’t really understand their perspective, and that’s the view from here.
THE VIEW FROM HERE
Vernon Oickle, the author of 32 books, writes The View From Here column, which appears weekly in the South Shore Breaker.