Talking to my friend the other day, she casually mentioned that her younger cousin doesn't know who Mr. Bean is. I genuinely had to pause for a second. How does a four-year-old not know Mr. Bean? How does a child grow up without knowing the characters that practically raised an entire generation? It sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, but it made me realise just how different childhood has become. There was a time when coming home from school meant throwing your bag somewhere, grabbing a snack and rushing towards the television because your favourite cartoon was about to start. There was no scrolling endlessly through hundreds of videos, no algorithm deciding what you should watch next and certainly no option to replay an episode whenever you wanted. You simply waited for it.
Then there were the weekends. The kind where waking up early didn't feel like a punishment because there was a Ben 10 movie playing at noon. You'd already seen half of it before, but that didn't matter because there was something comforting about watching it again. You knew the characters, you knew what was going to happen and you still sat there as if the ending might somehow change this time. Sometimes you'd sit with your siblings and argue about which alien was the coolest, or imitate the characters afterwards with absolutely no regard for how ridiculous you looked.
And then there was Art Attack. Somehow, every craft project looked unbelievably easy when the person on television was doing it. You'd gather whatever cardboard, glue, coloured paper and random household objects you could find and convince yourself that you were about to create something magnificent. It would inevitably look nothing like the thing on television, but that was never really the point. We were making things. We were trying things. We were getting bored, getting frustrated, starting again and occasionally getting glue absolutely everywhere.
Doraemon was a different kind of companion altogether. You could have a mountain of homework sitting in front of you and somehow convince yourself that watching just one episode would help you concentrate afterwards. It never did. One episode became two, two became five, and eventually someone at home would walk in and ask whether the homework had magically completed itself. Yet even those scoldings have become part of the memory now. The television was not simply something playing in the background. It was woven into the rhythm of our childhood.
I remember my parents asking me to sit away from the screen because it would damage my eyes, and then, five minutes after they'd leave, I'd go right back to sitting in front of the screen. There was always some excuse for why I had to be that close. Somehow, the cartoon became more interesting the closer I got to the television. Looking back, I think every child had their own version of this little rebellion.
And perhaps that is what surprised me most about hearing that little cousin doesn't know them. It wasn't really about Dora or Mr. Bean. It was the realisation that children today may be growing up with an entirely different kind of childhood, one shaped less by the television schedule and more by whatever an algorithm places in front of them.
We had limited choices, and somehow that made the choices feel more special. If your favourite show wasn't on, you couldn't simply search for an episode. You waited. If you missed something, you might not see it again for days. If your favourite movie was playing on a Sunday afternoon, that became an event. You didn't need someone to tell you to be excited about it. You were already waiting for it.
Today, a child can move from one piece of content to another within seconds. A cartoon can be replaced by a dance challenge, which can be replaced by a gaming clip, which can be replaced by a KATSEYE edit, which can be replaced by a completely unrelated video before the previous one has even had time to settle in their mind. There is always something newer, louder and more attention-grabbing waiting to appear. The next video is only a swipe away.
And maybe that is where the difference lies. We were also entertained, but we were not constantly stimulated. There were moments when there was simply nothing to watch. So you went outside. You annoyed your siblings. You drew something terrible on a piece of paper. You made a fort out of bedsheets. You called your friend on the landline and spent twenty minutes deciding who was going to hang up first. You complained that you were bored, and somehow boredom itself became an invitation to invent something.
I don't want to romanticise my childhood and pretend that everything was perfect. We had our own problems, and technology wasn't some evil force waiting to destroy us. In fact, having access to the internet has given children opportunities that we could never have imagined. They can learn languages, discover different cultures, find tutorials for almost anything and connect with people from places they may never visit. There is so much possibility in having the world at your fingertips.
But perhaps having the entire world at your fingertips comes with its own strange consequence. When everything is available, what becomes memorable?
We grew up with characters that almost everyone around us knew. You could walk into school and ask someone whether they watched the latest Ben 10 episode and almost guarantee that you'd have something to talk about. There were shared theme songs, shared jokes, shared obsessions and even shared arguments about which cartoon was better. Whether Regular Show was funnier or The Amazing World of Gumball, whether Ben 10's aliens were better than Danny Phantom's powers, there was always something to debate. Our childhoods weren't identical, but there were little cultural landmarks scattered across them that made us feel like we belonged to the same generation.
Now, childhood seems far more personalised. One child can spend an afternoon watching football edits, another can watch makeup tutorials, another can watch Minecraft videos and another can spend hours watching short clips of people doing challenges. Their screens know exactly what they like and keep feeding them more of it. They may have more content than we ever did, but perhaps they have fewer things that they can say, "Everyone watched this."
Maybe that is what makes me nostalgic. It isn't necessarily that I believe our childhood was better. It is that it felt shared. We had the same cartoons, the same theme songs, the same characters and sometimes even the same television arguments at home. We didn't realise we were creating a collective childhood while we were living it. We were simply kids waiting for our favourite show to come on.
And maybe, years from now, that will be the thing today's children miss. Not a particular cartoon, not a particular app or even a particular trend, but the feeling of having something that everyone else remembers too. Because perhaps the most beautiful thing about childhood wasn't what we watched. It was that somewhere across the country, another child was probably sitting just as close to the television, ignoring their mother's warnings, waiting for the exact same episode to begin.
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