Would you prefer to be a child today than the era you grew up in?

SharpshooterTom

Seems a lot of people I know around my age generally disliked their childhood growing up in the 80's and 90's how much they hated it and how horrible it was.

Children look back and think how did kids back as late as the 90's survive without the internet, phones, social media, its looks like a life of complete misery to them.

Would you have much preferred to grow up as a child today instead rather than in your era?

CPTM

I think I'd like to have been a child in the 50s and young adult in the 60s. Seems like it was a good time back then, in America in particular. Wouldn't want to be a kid born today, too much technology starting to take them from the real world. They're all haunted as far as I can see, bewildered when looking up from whatever device they're glued to.

cj maxx

To the OP, God no.

Jerry Atrick

ThomasFlynn wrote: »

Seems a lot of people I know around my age generally disliked their childhood growing up in the 80's and 90's how much they hated it and how horrible it was.

Children look back and think how did kids back as late as the 90's survive without the internet, phones, social media, its looks like a life of complete misery to them.

Would you have much preferred to grow up as a child today instead rather than in your era?

No, born early 80's. Don't envy kids nowadays

Fortunate to narrowly miss out on era of corporal punishment. Child of the mid-eighties, social media only started taking over when I was in my late teens. Can imagine the pressures youngsters have now, grateful I didn't experience that at 13 or 14. All in all, no complaints about timing. Feel I threaded a gap of sorts.

banie01

My childhood was the 80's with teen and early adulthood in the 90's.

Wouldn't swap it for a "current" childhood.
I've had the benefit of my stupidity being easily forgotten...
My tall stories being ever taller on the retelling!

All without the worries of digital proof or rebuttal.

Ireland was poorer in the past, but Christ we had some craic and pulled strokes that are better remembered as glory days than in the harsh glare of a screen, a video or a photo.

grazer

Child of the 70’s here, with mid 2000‘s kids. I was lucky enough to have a very low key nice childhood in Dublin. Far less complicated and orchestrated. I’d prefer more of that for my kids.
But that’s always the way; the older generation thinks the newer generation is doomed. I hope they surprise us.

ETA: the major plus for kids now (up until the past 10 weeks) was family holidays abroad. They were thin on the ground for us in the 80s. Cheap air travel really has been a bonus for today’s kids - again, up until the recent past.

Church on Tuesday

Born in '87 so a 90s kid essentially.

There was no real technology growing up. Family TV (4 channels), VCR, radio, CD player and that was about your lot. Playstation came later.

So you had to rely on imagination and playing outside making huts and playing games with friends till all hours. The internet was simply something you read about in school. And that's really not that long ago.

The 90s, as a kid, was a colorful time, pretty vibrant and carefree. Obviously education in technology is important in the 21st century and a useful tool but I think a lot of the innocence and wide eyed wonder for kids has been lost, I think I read somewhere that toy sales are way down; why bother using your imagination when technology and the latest device can do that for you?

It's the way things go though, just the next step in human evolution.

kowloon

I would have taken to the technology and enjoyed that and would be in more affluent surroundings now but I would have put something stupid online and it would be there forever. Maybe the fact that everyone was putting stupid **** online would make that easier but 80s/90s is familiar territory for me.
I'd be interested to see how kids born now turn out. There's more opportunity to follow your own interests now but stuff like internet porn must have a huge effect. There was a Black Mirror episode that dealt with it.

r93kaey5p2izun

Jesus no! 80s, 90s was a great time to grow up.

Rubberchikken

Grew up in one TV channel time, and no, no dinosaurs:)

Summer holidays consisted of 2 weeks at the sea in Wexford and the rest of the time filling out time playing - soccer, swimming in local pool when we could get the price if it, skipping out on the road (deathly quiet on a Sunday even though it was the centre of the town), playing 'tennis' of the courthouse wall which was across from our home and plenty more stuff. All of it fairly innocent and fun.

But I wouldn't wish that time on my kids, who are early 90s kids. Their life is theirs, different to mine and that's the way it should be.

Hulk Hands

I get as nostalgic for the 90s as the next person but we only think back to the fun experiences we had and not the sheer boredom of a lot of it. You fondly remember that old movie you had on vcr but fail to remember the 25 times you watched it out of lack of alternatives. How much time did any of us spend throwing stones at signs or poles.

The idea that kids nowadays have just heads constantly stuck in tablets these days is wrong also. If the parent is actively encouraging it, in most towns there's every sport or activity a kid could desire, such as swimming, gymnastics, basketball, from any age. If you grew up in semi rural Ireland in the 90s you had to wait until u12s football (or instead hurling in certain areas), and maybe a soccer team if lucky.

Kids these days generally get to have great experiences abroad, school tours to interesting places or even a holiday camp abroad. Better than our trips to Wexford or the zoo, notwithstanding as novel as each of those can so be.

TLDR: yeah kids now are lil shiites but they still have it better

kowloon

Hulk Hands wrote: »

The idea that kids nowadays have just heads constantly stuck in tablets these days is wrong also.

That's definitely going to have an effect. Entertainment overload has to be a thing. Time will tell.

JustAThought

Defo prefer the era I was brought up in - much more freedom, no video/photo witnesses to everything, the bullying was in person and you could usually mostly avoid them, no overwhelming pressure from internet/FB/instagram, technology overload and Jesus- the points to get into college nowadays.

I was walking the dog in the park yesterday and this kid scooted up alongside me and started chatting about the dog. All I kept doing was checking to see where his parent was as I didn’t want to be accused of anything! Kid was dog mad so he scooted alongside us chatting for about 15 minutes until I stopped in the hope his parents would catch up or he would tire and scoot away. He was eight years old, and started to cry because his mother had said his dog had ‘run away at night and wasn’t coming back’ and he was scared that Freddy Kruger and the Slenderman would come and get him after midnight now that he didn’t have his dog to protect him and save him from the deamons.
He knew they were real because he had seen them on the over 18’s section on Netflix and had read lots about them on youtube. My heart nearly stopped listening to him and his fears. No 8 year old kid should be facing into that cos his mother leave him to watch tv and use the computer when she is at work - and did I have a father because he didn’t anymore and a lot of his friends did.

God Almighty. Give me my happy childhood anyday. He walked around the park with me and I let him hug the dog and his mother was at work and wasn’t there and he was going home to an empty house. My heart broke for him. Life shouldn’t be that hard or complicated or alone when you are 8 years old.

Richard Hillman

I was happy with the era I grew up in. There was so much change in the first 20 years. I got to experience the Pre digital world then slowly discovering the current digital world.

Saying that. I definitely wouldn't have liked a Covid style lockdown during my childhood or teens. You're basically stuck in the house with a few TV channels and that's you're lot. You genuinely don't hear much from friends and there is no video on demand etc.

Tell me how

We are all guilty of looking through the past with rose tinted glasses.

I enjoyed a lot of my childhood and would be similar to many more here in that I would have a lot of concerns about the impact of technology on children today.
But, when I was young there were plenty things which worried me also.

We were poor, and while most others around us were in the same boat, I still worried about that even as a child. My mother focused on the positive but my fathers defense mechanism was to say that things could be (and probably would be) much worse and that made me think that that was always just around the corner. Our cousins were wealthy, by comparison, and so I felt inferior when interacting with them, which we did quite a bit.
I remember hearing the news about the troubles in the North and when Dessie O'Hare kidnapped John O'Grady and chopped off two of his fingers and being afraid that war was going to break out elsewhere in Ireland.

The challenges of today are different but human nature being what it is, I suspect that broadly speaking most people generation after generation experience the same multitude of emotions only in slightly different material circumstances.

The biggest challenge for kids today I imagine is the risk of what technology can do to their psyche. I fear there are kids who are being targeted with online abuse by anonymous accounts and kids who know that their friends are in group chats which they have been excluded from and the sheer inability to escape that must be mentally exhausting for some. I was bullied for a period as a kid and I used get such a sense of relief when I was able to escape that environment and feel safe but now, that little notification either flashing or not flashing on a phone screen can be a constant reminder to some.

If anyone reading this thread is thinking about their kids and of their neighbours or classmates and think that one of them maybe seems to be excluded, please try to find a way to have your child include them in some way. It could make such a difference to them and is a good example to teach anyone.

ILoveYourVibes

Yes way more diversity. Way more support and understanding. Way more opportunity.

Obvious Desperate Breakfasts

The ‘Slane Girl’ debacle made me realise how glad I was to be a child of the 80s and 90s and teen of the late 90s and early 00s. That girl did a really regrettable thing BUT I did know of things like that happening in my hometown when I was a teenager. Just the odd scandal, mind. But everything wasn’t recorded and they receded into the past very quickly. Somebody could do something embarrassing, cringe about it for a few weeks or months and then move on with their lives.

PommieBast

Not sure about childhood but going through university and early career I would opt for my own era hands-down...

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

i loved soccer in the 90s but rarely saw games or goals because we didn't have the channels. i bought shoot and match magazine every week and read the description of the goals and imagined them in my head. it just blows my mind that any kid nowadays can see those goals on their phone a few minutes after they happen. and can search youtube for any historical goals. so definitely prefer to live with the internet

SharpshooterTom

Interesting a lot of people talking about how young people (and I specifically mean young adults) having more opportunities than previous eras, but aren't millennials supposedly going to be first generation to be less well off than their elders in living memory?

Remember also if you've were born in the 80's you faced the worst economic recession since the great depression back in 08/09, with a slow economic recovery, austerity, and now are walking into an even bigger economic disaster because of Covid-19.

Millennials and young people although certainly have more opportunities in terms of social rights/LGBT rights, encounter less discrimination, their economic opportunities are more limited in many ways than previous eras, record number of millennials don't have kids because they can't afford them, can't afford a house or a mortgage etc. So its not all rosy for young people today either. If we have another decade of austerity children now who grow up as adults may still be feeling the effects of this.

s7ryf3925pivug

Earth is probably going to become a much more hostile environment during the lifetimes of kids today.

Things like having lots of TV channels and internet access become pretty irrelevant when you acknowledge that.

Lyan

LOL mobile phones have made kids so dumb and unimaginative. They aren't living real life like I did as a kid! Am I right fellow boomers? My opinions are totally scientific fact!

BrianD3

You don't miss things that don't exist and things are relative e.g. in the 1980s, Kid A might feel bad because his family hasn't got a VCR while Kid B's family does. Neither Kid A nor B will miss not having a smartphone.

One thing I'll say is that different eras might favour different individuals. For instance, academically, I was well ahead of the vast majority of my peers. Would this be the case if were a kid/teenager today? Perhaps my "edge" would be gone.

OTOH, when I was 17, I hadn't a clue what I wanted to do in terms of career and received very poor advice from various people who hadn't a clue what they were talking about. At the time, some of my peers were lucky enough to receive much better advice. If I were 17 today, I think I'd be much more informed so those others might not have their edge.

Barriers to entry have changed, e.g. affordability of third level education. Grade inflation has occurred in the LC and the reasons for this are probably complex and not just related to easier papers and marking. Is it now easier or more difficult to get into high demand third level courses than it was 20 or 30 years ago?

Cee-Jay-Cee

I grew up in the 70's/80's and would hate to be a child again in todays world however I think myself and my wife have done a good job so far keeping our children grounded and free from technology (theyre allowed one hour on sunday to play games on their Nintendo switch) They play outside and with their toys and go exploring through the fields which is pretty much how I was when I was their age. I would like to think that when they are grown they have happy childhood memories and wish the same for their children too.

ednwireland

no social media

could go out for the whole day without my parents worrying too much (as long as they roughly knew where i was

5 minute walk to the nearest phonebox

1970's

although it might have been different in the countryside i was in a large town surrounded by cities

Pauliedragon

Grew up late 80's early 90's. School summer holidays were out from 9am till dinner only home for lunch. Fields as far as you could see across the road so all day climbing trees, pilling hay under the tree and dare each other to jump onto it from higher and higher, bonfires in June. Great times. I'd have to jump into the car now to find a field.

Rodin

Hell no.
99s was great.


Modern music for teenagers to listen to is absolute rubbish .

Agricola

Before smartphones and social media children were able to be children and for longer. There was an innocence about it. If you think about the early sexualisation that's happening now whether it be through on demand free porn or young teenagers copying what they see from influencers when it comes to dress, it all serves to shorten childhood. Not to mention the narcissism that camera phones are now engendering in people from a younger age.

Ande1975

banie01 wrote: »

My childhood was the 80's with teen and early adulthood in the 90's.

Wouldn't swap it for a "current" childhood.
I've had the benefit of my stupidity being easily forgotten...
My tall stories being ever taller on the retelling!

All without the worries of digital proof or rebuttal.

Ireland was poorer in the past, but Christ we had some craic and pulled strokes that are better remembered as glory days than in the harsh glare of a screen, a video or a photo.

˄˄˄˄˄˄˄˄ This. I was and still am to some extent a naive dope that did some REALLY stupid things in the 80s/90s that I am blessed every day that there is no digital evidence of.

I grew up in the pre Oasis/Warehouse time where we occasionally got new clothes from catalogs. I wore my big brothers sweater going to college FFS. Children grow up way too fast now.
I was 19 when I did my J1 and my God I was still a child.
Wouldn't change it for the world though!

looksee

[QUOTE=CPTM;113480336]I think I'd like to have been a child in the 50s and young adult in the 60s. Seems like it was a good time back then, in America in particular. Wouldn't want to be a kid born today, too much technology starting to take them from the real world. They're all haunted as far as I can see, bewildered when looking up from whatever device they're glued to.[/QUOTE]

This was me, though in a fairly poor south Yorkshire mining village rather than the US.

I have only good memories of my childhood, my parents were loving and hardworking and I enjoyed school. We had very little in the way of material things, we got gifts at Christmas and birthdays but all very modest. We did not notice any shortcomings or lack of 'stuff'. I find the amount of plastic stuff that kids have nowadays rather overwhelming and unnecessary.

I got enormous pleasure and satisfaction from my teens - not at all cool by current standards. No technology, no drugs (in spite of the 60s) very little drink, clothes that I made myself and felt great in. A generally well behaved but adventurous (church) youth club where we organised ourselves and did all manner of things, from overnight hikes through countryside roads and churchyards, happily scaring ourselves to death, to camping, walking, brutally cold and wet pony trekking in the Welsh mountains, music (all kinds) dancing, sports - at least a try at fencing, shooting, orienteering, baseball. Talks and talking, drama. Those years structured the rest of my life and I am very grateful for them.

Children now have much better education opportunities - leading to much less flexible work opportunities. They have more material things - but what you don't know, you don't miss. Gifts have become almost meaningless for many children who are accustomed to the amount of stuff that comes into the house.

In the widest sense there is less deprivation, less ill health, fewer threats to their safety, but individually, comparing like with (almost) like I think life is much more demanding and constrained now.

Still, its what today's children know, times change and children are endlessly able to adapt.