Elegy for the American Childhood

An Obituary for What Once Was

Perpetually hovering over the sacred clock of my childhood was a quiet but ever-lurking ghost: the desire to grow up.

I couldn’t wait to be an adult. What a shame.

Like many children, I dreamt of the day I would finally reach adulthood. I longed for liberation from the constraints that came with a tiny body and naivety, yearning to at last be given the independence and authority I felt so deprived of.

I had, though, a deeply joyful childhood. Even for a Muslim immigrant growing up in post 9/11 America, the 2000s were kind to me. My memories are all stamped with scenes of sunlit playdates and smiley friends, the bright green grass and blue blanket sky above us as we played in our lawns, laughing loudly and endlessly, blissfully unaware of time. Going on sneaky adventures around the neighborhood with my sisters and neighbors, smiling at each other sheepishly as our mothers yelled at us to never do that again. Dancing to debut Taylor Swift and playing Wii sports in my friend’s basement (ah, the sacred American basement, the cornerstone of all sweet memories). Our screen time was limited to a few episodes of Hannah Montana or some Disney Channel original movie played on a big TV and watched from beanbags. In a generation now growing up on the lingo of binge-watching and brainrot, the habits of yesteryear seem as ancient as the Iliad.

When I reflect now on what I so deeply yearned for, there’s the basic truth that as a child with limited understanding of the world, I assumed that if life was already so wonder-streaked, it would be even more so when I could embark on such adventures without having to be told to be careful or come back before sunset.

What I realize now, though, is that I wanted to be an adult in the world as it was then. I, like many of us, never would have expected the world to change so drastically as it has. I thus dreamt of my adulthood in a world where the internet was still a fun escape, not your unavoidable abode, where the idea of machines taking over was still more joke than truth. I wanted it with all the good of then, and all the imagined goodness we assumed the future would inevitably bring. That, of course, was sweet childhood naïveté. Now, I look back with gratitude at the little glories that we took for granted. When I witness Gen Alpha in action, I consider myself lucky that I grew up with the exposure I did. I mourn the changing of a world lost, a world they never knew. To have lost it and miss it is not as sad, though, I think, as never having had it at all.

From Sunlight to Blue Light

I don’t often find myself around children; when I do, through community spaces like the mosque, I’m always a little taken aback by how different their reality is from what I grew up with. We adored and lovingly brought with us everywhere Silly Bandz and Junie B Jones books, holding them with such reverence. Now I see girls the same age I once was, innocent and doe-eyed, snapping selfies and recording TikToks, mirroring the same poses once revolutionized by those twice their age. Meanwhile, in a separate corner, the middle schoolers talk about which sunscreen at Sephora is better for their skincare routine.

When I was their age, the phones considered revolutionary and ultra cool were the ones that had sliding keyboards. When we all transitioned into iPhones, slowly slipping into a new life dictated by them, I couldn’t have imagined that in a decade, that very device would become the subject of so many mournful thought pieces lamenting their tyranny. I often think about something one of my teachers said in my senior year: “By the time you all have kids this age, phones will have already been stitched into your skin.” We laughed, but he wasn’t that far off; they’re so intrinsic to our being now that they may as well be —I can’t imagine what twenty years from now will look like. My own disdain for my phone has reached the point where I sometimes consider joining the band of people switching to tiny flip phones that can only make and receive calls. This is only amplified when I sit with a family friend’s kindergarten-going daughter, who knows her way around a phone so well that I find myself fretting at the mere thought of how much more the world will change in the next few years, and more so at the idea of raising kids in that world.

A daunting study reveals that:

“Just over half (51%) of kids ages 0–8 have their own tablet or cell phone, and about one in five of these young Alphas use their mobile devices for falling asleep, meal­times or emo­tion­al regulation.”

To make it worse:

“80% of parents of Gen Alpha children say their kids spend 7-8 hours a day on their phones.”

How could this not kill the very idea of childhood as we know it? Such digital dependency also inevitably leads to an array of health issues. Amongst them are:

• myopia

• insomnia

• delayed social development

• anxiety and depression

• weakened physique

• behavioral problems

• cognitive decline

We have a generation living on screens, apathy, and scrolling. Amazon, Sephora (!), AirPods. They drown out the noise of real life: the conversations in front of them, the song of the spirit intrinsic to them. They consume, consume, and then consume again. They fill their carts and in doing so, empty something within. That blank space is the childhood time has so cruelly exiled them from. In place of the once-ever-sweet now sits something deeply sour; it has become the only stage of life stripped of what defines it. It is now just the unkind passing of time.

This brings me to the thought of how slow time seemed to move as a kid. I don’t know if it was just the Massachusetts curriculum I grew up with, but my elementary school memories are riddled with images of the extremely creative projects we always had as assignments, ones that took an achingly long time (shoutout to my mom for her unpaid labor with those). They were, in hindsight, a little ridiculous, but cherished all the same because that’s what childhood should be: constant opportunity for and exploration of creativity, a push to build a good work ethic that cultivates mind and soul. When I remember that, I wonder if the kids of 2025 still have assignments as creatively curated as the ones I spent hours on. I question if they still spend hours outside playing make-believe, creating worlds just for the fun of it. I’m sure many do. But far too many, it seems, have not been spared from the abyss of the virtual worlds we have all fallen into, and now find to be inescapable.

When it comes to school assignments, to be fair, I have to acknowledge the crisis of living teachers across the country are experiencing. Aside from having to deal with the consequences of something they didn’t create, they’re extremely underpaid and undervalued. More times than I can count, I’ve come across TikTok videos of teachers, usually young women my age, discussing the complete decline in Gen Alpha’s attention span and corresponding behavioral issues. Their capacity to learn and absorb knowledge has been corrupted entirely by the screen enslavement they’ve fallen victim to. The idea that today’s children could handle projects like that (or that their parents will tolerate them) is a thing of the past, they complain. This isn’t surprising, of course. The phenomenon of diminished cognitive ability due to excessive scrolling (and the increase in outsourcing of thought to AI) is, first and foremost, one that adults are guilty of. Children, in all their purity, learn from what they see, what they know. Can we blame them then?

Aside from having killed their brain function, in the grave next to it lies the potential of their ambition, the breadth of the dreams that could have been. Amid the heaviness of adult life, there’s still nothing quite as sweet as a child’s soft answer to the question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Seeing their eyes light up and getting a glimpse into how these small but mighty minds think has been a generous and sanctified gift to the soul. So the twinge in my heart when I hear some of the things I do now lingers. Where we dreamt of being astronauts, surgeons, and the next great novelist, they say names I don’t recognize, idealize ‘influencers’, and don’t (can’t?) read books. Where we idolized Mae Jemison and Maya Angelou, they do Mr. Beast. We grew up chasing butterflies and bravery; they chase dopamine and distraction.

Children today are also “significantly less healthy” than they were nearly two decades ago in 2007, a new study reveals. This is not that unexpected, but sad nevertheless. The study goes on to mention another disturbing find:

“‘What we found is that from 2010 to 2023, kids in the United States were 80% more likely to die’ than their peers in European nations.”

This fact is attributed, unsurprisingly, to a tragic truth we have become too familiar with. There is a shadow over every child in America, growing unforgivably bigger every day — that of a gun.

Smells Like Teen Spirit? Not Anymore

The crisis experienced by teenagers is an entirely other arena with far too much to be said about it, but the misfortune of it all can still be succinctly understood through the same examples. Teenagers, no matter how much they reject this truth, are still children. The American childhood experience is, in some ways, more than anything, that of your teen years, as a country and culture obsessed with coming-of-age narratives. So what does that mean for them in an era sunken in bedrotting and broken empathy?

When I look back on my teenagehood, despite lamenting then that it was far too boring and would never amount to the thrills of a CW show (in hindsight, thankfully), I see it now in a new light. I’d like to think we had a decent enough balance of being on and offline. All of my memories with my friends are still largely defined by our in-person activities; of course, our phones and social media notifications accompanied us, but we didn’t have TikTok or reels, which have truly changed the way people engage with scrolling and each other now.

Screenshots from two of many TikToks. The bottom one has 168,000+ likes, with comments ranging from “This is so cute, same” to “This makes me sad.”

So, then, the American coming of age, once soaked in and defined by days spent under the sun, now finds itself in a casket beneath the shadow of phones desperate to click a pic — and post it to their story.

The Pandemic, Pinkies, and Politics

To capture the might of the guilty, it would be inaccurate and unfair to ignore the elephant in the room. If tech stole kids’ time, politics stole their world. If anyone other than Big Tech can take the blame for the bullet, it’s Big Brother.

There was still somewhat of a sense of political ‘normalcy’ in the last days of my childhood, though anybody who knew me in high school and reads this will likely laugh, remembering how adamant I was in preaching the opposite. That being said, if we’re using the lens of pre- and post-MAGA, I graduated from high school the year Trump became president in 2017, moving overseas for university a few months later. What began as a joke ended up becoming the nail in the coffin of many realities, most of which people are only just now waking up to. If we are to pretend the country’s descent into inevitable fascism over the past 8 years and its status as a genocidaire the past 2 haven’t left a striking scar on the collective psyche of a generation, big tech truly has won in their quest to dumb us down.

Just referring to the political landscape, the idea that things could’ve gone back to ‘normal’ during Biden (or hypothetically, in a Kamala presidency) isn’t even worth considering. Not only because of the nature of his administration and the complete social overhaul America experienced with the introduction of MAGA, but also because of the transformative impact of the pandemic. Quarantine isolation and the social media zeal it birthed meant children missed formative years of socializing and development, and with it came even worse screen addictions and dented pinkies. I need not go into detail about the consequences of the growing exposure they now have to toxic ‘chronically online’ culture. Or, all the things that come with it, for instance: the increasingly ever-present reality of adult content making its way into the mainstream as our society drifts deeper into a highly sexualized abyss. Our culture has somehow convinced us that that’s not something of concern; the intensity of this crisis speaks for itself.

The world has changed in many ways, far more than what I’ve briefly touched upon here, and not all of those ways are unkind, to be fair. Every generation and every time has its unique pros and cons, and though what I speak of here is scary, it is not unbelievable in its magnitude. For those who pay attention, it is just one aspect of a larger reality — that of our general decline in humanity. What more can one say about a world that has enabled and witnessed a genocide as we have the past 21 months? If it weren’t so evil, it would’ve been nice to have something we could confidently say will never go away, but one of the only continuities in the American childhood, it seems, is the quiet observation of children a world away bearing the brunt of US-made bombs. The only difference is that in 2005, it was watching the invasion of Iraq on a boxy TV, and twenty years later, it’s witnessing Palestinian children plead for mercy via TikTok.

The Sun Still Shines

Despite my tone throughout this essay, I mean not to fearmonger or paint this generational difference as ‘black and white’ as it may have come off. I lament only that so many kids today are growing up without the silence, the slowness, and the sacred boredom that made us whole. I am saddened that the ugly imprints of the big and the bad do not leave them be; I wish it weren’t so. I mourn a world that’s slipping away, but the truth is — children are still as sacred, sweet, and simple as they always have been, and always will be. Nobody can or will take that away from them, or be able to extinguish the light they bring to our world. It’s been dimmed in some ways, sure, stolen to brighten instead the blue-toned screens in front of them, but it’s not gone (check out Recess Therapy).

Perhaps this is the undying optimism my own childhood left me with, but in spite of all this sour, the promise of a different tomorrow lives, even if its call is a whisper amongst louder echoes. We may not be able to give today’s children our childhood, and we most certainly can’t give them a perfect world, but we can still give them our attention, our patience, and try to recreate the slowness we once knew — starting with the reintroduction of it in our own lives. We can also actively work to cultivate a kinder, fairer society in this time of horrific injustice. Perhaps then the adulthood they inherit, even if not freed from tech’s tyrannical touch, is at least one that still honors what it means to preserve truth and goodness.

“These are all our children. We will profit by, or pay for, whatever they become.”

— James Baldwin

If you are able, consider donating to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund here.

---

References:

A Systematic Literature Review of Education for Generation Alpha

The Impact of Screen Time on Vision

The Impact of Social Media and Tech on Gen Alpha

Gen Alpha is snubbing the careers that boomers dreamed of

For Gen Alpha, Learning to Read is Becoming a Privilege

A New Study: The Health of U.S. Kids Has Declined Significantly Since 2007

The Intrusion of Media Sexualization in Childhood

Recess Therapy

Further Reading:

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr

Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking Our Kids, Dr. Nicholas Kardaras

---