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Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
Growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, there’s a version of childhood I remember fondly that simply doesn’t exist anymore.
My generation remembers the world before the internet – before the world really sped up, and before algorithms were analyzing our three-second attention spans.
I recorded the ballad Kiss from a Rose off the radio onto a cassette tape and played it on repeat, singing to the mirror while applying whatever lipstick I could steal from my mom. At school, I used the payphone to call the local radio station, hoping to get on the air. At home, I’d call random numbers from our landline, making up fake products to see if anyone was interested. One woman liked the pitch so much she gave me her friend’s phone number. It was a very 1990s way of getting into trouble – too much time on our hands, maybe – but it made us resourceful, weird and spunky.
We’d do anything to escape boredom.
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At sleepovers, we scared ourselves silly trying to levitate during séances – “light as a feather, stiff as a board.” In the summers, I barely saw my school friends. I was off canoeing out of thunderstorms, coming back with stories to tell. I can’t believe my parents let me get into some of these adventures – but I’m endlessly grateful they did.
My dad would take quiet drives from point A to point B, a Beatles Love Songs cassette in the station wagon. He’d tell me how he recorded it from his older brother’s record, the tape clicking into place. Today, when I stream Britney Spears for my kids, I realize Baby One More Time is as ancient to them as the Beatles were to me.
I yearn for that feeling: the quiet of the car, the breeze through a cracked window, the absence of urgency. There was nothing else competing for our attention, no sense that we should be somewhere else. Just the road and the lyrics – a stillness that’s harder to come by now and harder still to protect.
Modern parenting often feels like orchestrating an elaborate production that runs 24/7. We overmanage and we are overstimulated. Sometimes I catch myself wanting to put my whole family into a time machine – to move next door to Home Alone’s Kevin McCallister or the Tanner family of Full House.
Three years retired and I wonder: Am I lost, depressed or quietly content?
I’m on a mission to reclaim my children’s childhoods – not to recreate the decade I grew up in, but to resist the speed and chaos of modern life. I ask myself, again and again: Where is there breathing room? Where is there space for imagination and play?
The implementation is messy. We have four kids and most nights involve navigating two or three different activities; we are not a shining example of slow living. But we’ve set boundaries where we can. We try to limit screens, even when it would be easier to hand over my phone.
This season of their lives is brief. I’m trying not to rush through it.
We want a traditional corded landline telephone; it’s been on my to-do list to set our family up with one. Video calls are special, but I want them to experience focused attention – hearing a story without having to perform – and to remember those conversations. I reached a breaking point last Monday. Caught between two dance classes, an unanswered email to an executive and a nagging mental list of chores, I was rushing to get everyone fed. Then I stopped. I realized my kids were busy peeking through blankets in a giant, messy fort built from every cushion in the house. In that moment, my work laptop, the family project management app and the dinner prep could all wait.
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If we are intentional about clearing out the noise, I hope they’ll remember the analog things. Writing handwritten postcards and letters. Journaling vacation memories. Keeping the bookmark light on to read just one more chapter of Goosebumps.
Maybe they’ll remember laughing through family quizzes pulled from old teen magazines. Some nights, we use our smartphone flashlights to shine against the wall, making shadow plays with dolls and horses. “Just one more,” I say as the silhouettes dance for us, until we all finally need to sleep.
I was born into a generation that lived in both worlds: before email accounts and after. We’ll never be an all-’90s household, but I still try – by letting my kids make their own snacks and encouraging them to be bored in the backyard.
I don’t want to romanticize the past or reject what we’ve gained. Some changes have made parenting more informed and compassionate. But I remain in awe of having known what it felt like before everything sped up. My kids will only ever experience fragments of that earlier world. Maybe that’s enough.
If I’m pretending they live in the ’90s at all, it’s in the hope that they form vivid core memories I didn’t art-direct – that they wander on bikes into the dusk, hush their laughter in basements and whisper through hours-long calls on that landline, the way we once did.
Kaili Colford lives in Toronto.