Latest news with #90sSummer
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘90s kid summer' trend ditches tech in favor of retro fun — here's why it won't work for all parents
Millennial parents are throwing it back. After the recent resurgence of iconic nineties trends jelly shoes, chunky highlights and flip phones, the ''90s kid summer' parenting trend reeks of turn-of-the-century nostalgia. Yet, proponents behind it say they're not just harking back to their childhoods — they're sick of their screen-addicted kids. Just before summer vacations across the country began, millennial parents took to TikTok en masse to reminisce on their own school-free months. In the comments of TikTok posts like this video by @_natenorman, nostalgic nineties kids recalled the days spent outside from dawn to dusk, biking alone to community pools, the unsupervised neighborhood playtime, and above all, the lack of communication from parents who simply wanted a few hours of peace and quiet. 'My summer memories all involve pools, sports, and exploring the woods. Creeks, birdwatching, riding bikes with the neighborhood kids and my siblings,' read one reply. 'The attic fan on at night is all I remember of indoors.' Many parents online claim that they're giving their kids a '90s summer to promote positive development like independence and creativity. And according to experts, they're not wrong to do so. The American Psychological Association says that unstructured play can help children progress in important body and muscle growth, socializing, decision-making skills, conflict management, and empathy, among other areas. However, a '90s summer is simply not feasible for some, and growing pressure from online parenting communities is leading to undue stress and guilt. Kristin Gallant, a parenting expert who posts child-rearing and mom life content on Instagram as @biglittlefeelings, was among the anxious millennials. 'If it works for your family, great,' says Gallant in the video. 'Working parents, we're stressed out when we see this. We need to send our kids to camp or have some child care' so the unplanned routine doesn't work quite the same, she explained. She also mentioned how neurodiverse kids and sensitive children who thrive on structure likely also wouldn't benefit from this trend. 'If you can't give your kids a '90s summer, don't let it make you feel like s–t,' she concluded. Claire Vallotton, professor of human development and family studies at Michigan State University, agrees that making a sudden shift towards the '90s summer lifestyle is not beneficial to kids, and explains that the trend is likely a response to the tendency that many modern parents have towards both maximizing their child's development by overscheduling them with classes, camps and other programs, as well as allowing young kids to have way too much screen time. In an interview with USA Today, Vallotton said that most kids of today 'are overscheduled and using technology too much,' and a majority of them are not spending time outdoors alone like their millennial parents. The urge to overcorrect with the '90s summer trend makes 'a lot of sense, but trying to solve it all in one summer isn't going to work for either the children or parents,' she explained. 'You can't just have this over-scheduled, technology-saturated life for nine months of the year and then switch into this absolute freedom,' Vallotton elaborated. 'We haven't prepared our children for that… It's going to make the children potentially more anxious.' Some parents online have commiserated with Gallant for numerous reasons. Some complain of 'velco children' — kids who stick to their parents' sides non-stop — while others bemoan the dangers and rising childcare costs plaguing the modern world. 'Give me a 90s economy and 90s real estate prices and I'll see what I can do,' replied a mom, agreeing with Gallant. 'I wish ['90s summer] was an option now for our kids. Karens everywhere crying about the noise of a basketball, no woods to go venture in or build treehouses, and people are always driving distracted, so riding bikes down the road can't happen,' said one commenter under @_natenorman's TikTok, explicating the impossibility of recreating those summers of the past. Meanwhile, other parents offered their own interpretations of the sudden online push for the resurgence of a '90s summer. 'What I take from the 90s summer is letting go of the pressure to be over-scheduled, do every single expensive camp, and be IG perfect,' replied one user under Gallant's video. 'I think the takeaway is that it's okay to let your kid have a solid chunk of independent play where you as the parent are not playing camp Director,' explained another. 'It's not unsupervised but unstructured. Not all day but part of it. For me, after lunch, I might push the kids outside and go read on the porch while they figure it out. They have things to do provided, but it's dealer's choice.' Instead of making an instantaneous transition like millennial parents across the Internet seem to imply, Vallotton advised that parents slowly reduce technology access for kids and encourage children to play together outdoors while supervising from afar.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The idea of inflicting a 90s summer on children makes me anxious. Mainly because I was there
A recent piece in US publication the Cut has picked up on a curious sentiment seen floating around TikTok; public yearning to recreate a '90s summer'. One can see the temptation of nostalgia for Americans, given the present they're trapped in – and, perhaps, the El Salvadoran gulag they're trapped in – is hardly so rosy. But as bombers fly over Tehran and their out-of-his-depth president handles a fragile situation by swearing at Benjamin Netanyahu on TV, it's worth asking if the promptings of nostalgia may be what got us all into this mess in the first place. Millennials are now parents. As the Americans of this generation have preoccupied themselves with scheduling activities for their summer holidays, the Cut relates stated longing for youthful experiences they remember as 'going to the public pool by themselves, biking around aimlessly, watching daytime TV with elderly relatives, and taking no-frills family road trips'. Some Australians, no doubt, concur – given the interminable circulation of Facebook's like-harvesting slop insisting on a never-had-to-lock-your-door, none-of-this-woke-rubbish paradise that was supposedly once lying around in the stubby shorts of Australian back yards past. Personally, the idea of inflicting a '90s summer' on children makes me anxious. It's only because I was there. As a flanno-wearing, Nirvana-bothering resentful ex-smoker whose character retains something of a black beer tang, I am gen X, purely distilled. It has been affirming to watch younger generations lambast us as 'the worst generation' on TikTok but, sadly, in this Era of Failure to Ask Follow-up Questions, the youngsters haven't been asking us why. Kids, the 90s are a significant part of it. A fantastically bleak epoch of pop culture archives gen X's cold war terrors of the 1980s, but the youngest of us were only nine when the 1990s kicked off with the first Gulf war. Bombs rained on the Middle East, with American boots on the ground and genuine fear of nuclear escalation. I was 15 and finally phoned that boy I liked only because I'd been watching the news and was convinced I had nothing to lose, we were all going to die. If your trips to the pool were unchaperoned, it was because in the wake of stagflation and globalisation male-breadwinner models of household income were suddenly unstable and it wasn't so much feminist destiny as neoliberal necessity that drove even white ladies from the suburbs en masse into full-time work. Highlights of the TV news kids watched with their grandparents included: Iraq, an entire decade of Yugoslav wars, the LA riots (1992), the standoff at Waco (1993), the OJ Simpson trial, the Oklahoma City bombing and Yitzhak Rabin's assassination (all 1995) and India and Pakistan becoming nuclear states (1998). Biting neoliberal doctrines of mass casualisation, smashed unions, public service layoffs and privatisation meant that 'no frills' car trip holidays were all many working- and middle-class families could reasonably afford. And if you were biking around aimlessly, it was because Francis Fukuyama had announced in 1992 it was never going to get better than this … and turned out to be wrong in the worst possible way. Kathryn Jezer-Morton pinpoints '90s summer' nostalgia as simply grasping for the memory of unstructured time before the 'gaping maws' of mobile internet and social media swallowed it; she rightly identifies 'anxiety over screen management' as the modern parenting crisis. Australia's upcoming social media ban for kids is wildly popular and yet may become even more so, given Jezer-Morton's revelation that American families now drop up to $5,500 US on two-week summer camps to just keep their kids screen-free. There's something even more insidious about the relationship of our phones to nostalgia. 'Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,' as a man once said to a madeleine. The main character of our memories is ever a subjective take our earlier selves. If gen X remembers the 90s with stark contrast to millennials, it may be because the handheld doom machines are profoundly affecting the way we understand – or don't understand – the past. An emerging body of scholarship has identified the corrupting effects of new tech on memory and recall. Digital photography collapses the boundary between past and present, rendering the past as immediate, retrievable, portable and available. It places viewers in a loop of ongoing memory reactivation. The irony of this is that distance – and, with it, reflection – become harder to achieve, an effect made worse by the quantitative overload of storing so much material. Meanwhile, knowing it can outsource its histories, the brain encodes fewer details. The combined result makes memory less about accuracy and more about the emotional management of the overwhelm; suppressing trauma, reinforcing denial or romanticising difficult realities. The photographs don't teach history to the viewer; they are recruited to the viewer's narrative. The selective exclusions and recontextualisations are how millennials might remember the era of the Srebrenica genocide (per The Cut) as 'the last time 'things were good''. They're also why 'Make America Great Again' is so mobilising as a political mission and so disastrous as a policy framework. Weaponising nostalgia can grip a psychology but it can't change the facts underneath. Alas, one glance at today's headlines and no one should wonder why Americans might want to escape back to their '90s summers'. The past is, after all, another country. They do things differently there.
