Parenting in 2025

Yesterday I was playing with Jackie in her room when I heard a light knock on the front door. Thankfully our house happens to be across the street from a park and so Jackie has friends from the bus, school, or around the neighborhood that will knock on our door for her to come out to play. I absolutely love this! It is one of the few life experiences that overlaps from my childhood to Jackie’s.

I grew up in a small town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. You were typically 1 degree of separation from everyone in the county. Our unincorporated town had 3 streets. My sister and I were allowed to run around the neighborhood with our friends until dinner most nights. We got dial-up internet sometime in middle school. If we wanted to go to the pool in the summer, we rode our bikes there. Our house didn’t have air conditioning until high school, so we often slept with the windows open. Walmart came to the town next door when I was in high school. We knew the home land line telephone numbers for all of our friends and if we wanted to make plans, we would call them on the phone and then call other friends to all go to the 1 movie theater on Friday or Saturday night. Once we got our license, April and I shared a cell phone. If you drove the car (we also shared) then you got the cell phone. Our friends’ parents were second parents to us.

Jackie is growing up in northern New Jersey; our neighborhood has about 20 streets. We take the highway to the pool. We have central air conditioning. She knows how to shop on Amazon. When Jackie was born, we were quite serious about no screen time. We did a decent job of limiting screen time until COVID. The iPad coparented with us for 4 months. We have now found a middle ground between none and way too much. Jackie has high speed internet, more streaming apps than I care to count, and is already learning to use a Chromebook at school. No one has a land line telephone anymore. A main consequence of no land lines is that James and I are the keepers of Jackie’s social life. We have not given Jackie a phone yet nor have most of her friends’ parents. So, the parents all have to text each other in order to set up a meet-up for the kids.

I am mindful of the fact, and perhaps this happens to most generations, that I have not experienced a lot of the life experiences that Jackie is now experiencing at her young age. I have no idea where this text, chat, AI-driven world will end up. I worry that moments that are unscripted and spontaneous will become fewer and fewer. For now, I will keep encouraging the neighborhood kids to knock on our door and for Jackie to go out and play until dark!

What do you miss about growing up in a pre-internet, cell phone, AI world?