There are plenty of things from my childhood that deserve to stay there. The Electric Youth scent. Bean bag chairs. Graffiti pants. I was born on the cusp of when Gen X turned millennial. I watched my favorite shows on cable, stuff taped on a VHS, and movies on Blu-ray. My family went through iterations of computing: Commodore 64, Tandy 1000, the colorful iMac, and so on.

Gen Alpha, on the other hand, is the first generation that has never known a world without smartphones. They’re growing up with YouTube, TikTok, AI, and algorithms shaping everything from what they watch to what they ask for at the store on Amazon. While researchers are still untangling exactly how technology is reshaping childhood, there’s little debate that today’s kids spend more time on screens and less time in the kind of unstructured, offline play that defined previous generations. 

I’m not someone who thinks that automatically makes childhood worse. My 10-year-old has opportunities I never dreamed of. She can learn to play piano from YouTube, FaceTime her grandparents, and ask Alexa to settle family debates in seconds. She embodies digital fluency that I never will.

But lately, I’ve started wondering if, in making childhood more connected and more convenient, we’ve accidentally removed the value of limitations, and the wonder of messy, imperfect play.

Then, my daughter and her friends unknowingly recreated a scene from my own childhood. It started with Michael Jackson.

Dance Routines on Blurry Screens

Like many parents, I know his legacy is complicated, and one day my daughter and I will have those conversations. For now, though, she and her friends discovered Bad after seeing the recent Michael Jackson movie (also problematic). Suddenly, the soundtrack to my childhood had become theirs for a moment. Lucy and two friends from her musical theater summer camp made a dance routine to Bad. “We performed it for everyone at camp, and they clapped,” Lucy said.

One of the camp counselors had recorded it on someone’s old cellphone that no longer makes calls or sends texts. It survives only as a camera for one of the campers. She held up the phone to show me the video, and it was grainy, dark, and just blurry enough that I could barely make out the girls’ faces. It was also perfect.

Watching that video, I wasn’t just seeing three 10-year-olds dancing. I was suddenly back in my parents’ living room in the early ’90s, where my cousins, neighborhood friends, and I spent entire summers choreographing routines to Michael Jackson, George Michael, New Kids on the Block, TLC, and whoever else we were obsessed with that week. We’d borrow my dad’s oversized camcorder, argue over formations, rewind cassette tapes a hundred times, and proudly watch our performances back on the television. The footage was terrible. We were making content before it became a money maker for influencers. We were also making memories.

Disposable Cameras and Camp Friends

The next morning, I was doing carpool for theater camp when Lucy asked if she could borrow my iPhone to take a group selfie with her friends. I said no. Instead, we stopped in the CVS next to the camp, and picked up disposable cameras. (Yes, they still sell them there.) I bought two—one for Lucy and one for her friend, Laura. “You each get 27 pictures,” I told them. “That’s it. Make them count.” The photos will take three weeks to develop once I drop them off, and I know with certainty they’ll be worth the wait.

Bike Riding and Messy Play

Last month, there was another moment that caught me by surprise. Every summer, our town closes our usually busy street for a 5K race. For a few hours, the steady stream of traffic disappears, and the neighborhood belongs to kids again. Neighbors drag lawn chairs to the curb, families cheer on runners, and children who might otherwise be sitting on couches with iPads suddenly have the freedom to roam. 

Lucy and her friends spent the afternoon riding their bikes up and down the empty street, weaving around each other with the kind of carefree confidence that feels increasingly rare. Standing on the sidewalk, the other moms and I thought of the movie, Now and Then—just friends on an adventure. 

It wasn’t long before the girls migrated to a patch of dirt near the curb, where they spent an embarrassingly long time digging with sticks, filling an empty water bottle with soil, and laughing over some elaborate game only they understood. No one had a screen in front of them. They were absorbed in a world they had invented themselves, and watching them felt like catching a fleeting glimpse of a childhood I forgot could exist.

A Backyard Movie and a Handful of Fireflies

Then, there was movie night. Claudia, a mom friend, transformed her backyard into an outdoor theater, complete with a projector, tents, and a showing of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (which came out in 1989). Eight kids stretched out on blankets and sleeping bags, snacked on Swedish Fish, Skittles, M&M’s, and overflowing popcorn boxes. I love how the movie-night staples of my generation remain. The kids drifted between watching the movie and chasing fireflies.

In an age of autoplay, endless doomscrolling, and algorithms designed to keep them hooked on a mindless loop, this 37-year-old movie kept a group of friends no older than 10 as focused as I’ve ever seen them. It turns out, some films hold up. Maybe kids’ attention spans aren’t broken, after all. They just need something worth paying attention to.

Bringing Back the Nostalgia 

Now I’m on a quest. How many other ways can I subtly integrate my 1990s childhood (or the conditions for something similar) to my daughters? A quick search gave me these ideas:

So back to that disposable camera with only 27 pictures… I don’t know what Lucy and Laura photographed this week at camp yet. Maybe half the pictures will be of ill-placed fingers. Or, they’ll be over-exposed and blurry as heck. Weirdly, I kind of hope they are because, years from now, I don’t want Lucy to remember whether those photos were Instagram-worthy or not. I want her to see those grainy prints fading around the edges and remember, we had so much fun.