Is it Harder to Grow Up In the 21st Century Than In the Past?

By: Oleksiy Korytnyuk, PrideTime Photographer

There has always been an argument regarding whether older people nowadays had an easier or harder childhood than kids today. One side occasionally says that they’d have to walk 50 miles to go to school, or they had to work 24/7 because they had to. And the other side claims that life is easier for them because they didn’t have any cell phones or social media, so they weren’t judged as much. For both sides, that might’ve been the case but also they could be lying. In this article, I’ll interview a teacher to compare their childhood to kids my age. 
I interviewed Dr. Rich, a Chemistry teacher here at Brien McMahon High School. I started off by asking when Dr. Rich was the ages of two to sixteen. He told me that from 1974 to 1990 was when he was two to sixteen. Then we got into the questions regarding our respective childhoods. I asked the chemistry teacher whether he thought it was easier to grow up back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. He expressed (with a bit of thought) that it was “a little easier to grow up in general”. When I asked him if he thought that kids are having a harder time growing up nowadays, he said, “As far as growing up there’s a lot more, access to information and social media and everything people can search it, so there is a lot more access to what you’re doing, who you’re doing it with, what you’ve done, where you’ve gone.” And when I finally asked him if he’d rather grow up now or back then, he simply said, “I don’t have a preference but I’m glad from my experience and I can use some of that experience to help kids today”.
When I look back on Dr. Rich's thoughts regarding the difference between our childhoods, it does seem like it was an easier time. No social media, no cell phones, just not a lot of sources to get stressed from. I’m looking back to my question and wondering what I think and I do believe it was an easier time back then. Kids didn’t grow up as fast, meaning kids actually were kids and weren’t trying to act older than they actually were. Kids grew up tougher, and people wouldn’t try to beat around the bush. They would be honest, making it easier for each other because people had that trust in place