eople always think the world is ending and worry about bringing children into it. I did, but it’s now a fait accompli. My son is in the next room, watching a cartoon about dinosaurs with his little sister on YouTube.
The tangible differences between their streaming a cartoon in 2022 versus my watching one on television in 1982 are incidental, and the concerns I have about screen time on their cognitive development were anticipated by my own parents back then . But the delivery system for their animated drug makes the enterprise register as more sinister and dystopian: the data harvesting, the algorithmic serving of the next entree, the seamless stitching between end credits and the start of the next episode.
People always think the world is ending and worry about bringing children into it. The start of the monthlong Sino-Vietnamese War the day before I was born in 1979 convinced my parents that they were introducing me to a planet on the brink of World War Three. But dodging a potentially deadly airborne virus with a newborn and a toddler really has a way of making you question your historical timing.
As parents tend to do, I’ve thought back a lot on my childhood, comparing my kids’ experiences to my own. The 1980s were far from paradisiacal; Reaganism wasn’t too far off from Trumpism, just with a friendlier smile and politer rhetoric, and the threat of nuclear annihilation was always just a nervous trigger finger away. Still, in my perhaps overly nostalgic recollection, those times strike me now as far more innocent, for the world and for childhood.