Was Gen X the last generation to have a carefree childhood?

For all the latchkey kids, the cynics, and the slackers.

When I was your age…

The phone in our house was attached to the kitchen wall and if I wanted to talk in private, I had to stretch the phone cord to its limit until the spiral coils made a straight line all the way to my room. Our phone was mustard yellow which coordinated with the pale yellow walls of our kitchen. I was pretty young when rotary dials were replaced with push button phones, but I still remember what a huge deal it was because of how fast you could punch in someone’s phone number since you didn’t have to wait anymore for the dial to circle all the way back in between. We’d groan if somebody had a lot of nines and zeroes in their digits because it took forever to dial. Technology!

When I was your age…

My mom had to drive me to a record store whenever my favorite bands released new albums. She’d wait in the car as I dashed into Crazy Eddie or The Wiz and made a beeline to the alphabetized rows of cassette tapes, thumbing my way down the bands until I found the one I came for. I’d then sit in the backseat, hands shaking to open the plastic wrap in nervous excitement because I had no idea what to expect as I slipped that tape into my Sony Walkman. I’d listen to the album on the entire ride home, in the order of songs that the artists intended, happy that I finally had new songs to obsess over.

When I was your age…

Before I was able to convince my mom to get MTV, there was Friday Night Videos. I would sneak into the kitchen past midnight and quietly turn on the TV, slowly turning the knob to channel 4 with my best attempts to not make any clicking sounds as I turned past each number on the dial, just the way I practiced when no one was looking. Because for sure I would have gotten into trouble if my parents found me awake at 1am, glued to the tiny television in the kitchen. I would sit right in front of the screen to block off the glow with the sound turned down as low as it could go while still being audible, and wait for videos from my favorite bands, one ear to the TV set and the other alert for any rustling noise coming from the other bedrooms.

When I was your age…

We reached for the encyclopedia whenever we had a question, plucking a volume from the row of alphabetized books off our shelves. The “A” and “M” volumes were always the books with the most pages while “J” had to share its wisdom with the letter “K” and even then, it was the thinnest volume on my bookshelf. There were times, however, when we had no choice but to trek to the library when we had a question that required more research than a simple entry in an encyclopedia.

Sometimes, we didn’t know the answers to our questions for days.

When I was your age…

We never drank water or ate kale.

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I’ve thought quite a lot about the childhood that my kids have had now that they are on the cusp of adulthood. I imagine that they could define it as pre- and post- Covid since it hit them at their most formative adolescent years. Just today, I saw a segment on the morning news that Gen Z is statistically the least happy generation. In a world that is volatile and sometimes resembles the end of days, I often wonder…how will they define their childhoods when they look back?

My generation might have been the least parented generation of our times. We were left alone at home at an early age while our parents worked, reheating dinners wrapped in Saran wrap left in the fridge for us by our moms. We became the generation of divorce and latchkey parenting, which in turn made us resourceful, but also cynical. Summers were boring because we didn't have any expectations to impress anyone with how we spent our time outside of school. Our days were largely unscheduled and we didn’t worry about being pointy or well-rounded or published authors or founders of companies at age 16. We were just kids, and that was enough to get you into college.

My generation grew up in in the golden era of pop culture with the rise of music videos and affordable concert tickets, but this was also an era when patience was part of the experience of being a music fan. The slow wait of anticipation for the release of a new album might still be similar today, but the experience isn’t. We had to wait until we got home from school or could drive to the store or clear whatever else stood in our way between us and our music. Instant gratification wasn’t a part of our world. Patience was a part of life for most things, in fact. Do you remember dropping off a roll of film to get your photos developed, and the excitement of picking up that fat envelope a few days later? We’d open it the minute we left the store because we couldn’t wait to get home to see what surprise moments the camera captured, bad pictures and all. No edits or retakes.

My generation went to school before the age of Columbine. We didn’t think about guns and didn’t worry about feeling unsafe in school, but we did grow up with the terror of AIDS and homophobia. No, not all of the 80s/90s was great, obviously, and many of us had less than perfect or even turbulent home lives, but when I think of my early childhood overall, I feel like we were the last generation allowed to be just kids.

When I think back, the loss of some of that innocence was witnessing the Space Shuttle Challenger explode on live TV. There was a teacher astronaut, Christa McAuliffe, on board which was why schools around the country were encouraged to watch the launch in classrooms together with their teachers. We gathered around the clunky TV set that was wheeled into our room to watch the Challenger launch, only to see it explode 73 seconds later. I can’t recall exactly what happened right when we collectively witnessed the doomed fate of those seven astronauts; the only thing I remember was the deafening silence in the room that followed and lasted what seemed like an eternity. It stands out in my mind as a pivotal moment, witnessing a shocking event with others, as it unfolded. I know this type of shared collective experience happens all the time now, but back then it wasn’t common. It’s what made watching Live Aid on TV so monumental.

When my kids aren’t rolling their eyes every time I begin a conversation with “when I was your age…” they’ve expressed curiosity about what our childhoods were like, before the internet and before the paralysis of too many choices and endless distractions.

I can’t imagine life without my phone and the internet at this point, but I’m glad I had a childhood without it. We grew up in an analog world where we had to rely on our imaginations to keep ourselves entertained. We only had our circle of peers to judge and compare ourselves to, and that’s why it feels like we were the last generation to have a carefree childhood. It wasn’t us vs. the rest of the world quite yet.