Picture this: It’s Saturday morning, and the year is 1995. Mom and Dad are in the kitchen with the radio on, throwing Pop-Tarts in the toaster. The children are outside, running through the sprinkler, or maybe watching a PBS rerun of Sesame Street, while engrossed with a glue stick, safety scissors, sugar paper, and old magazines to cut out. In the afternoon, it’s time for a bike ride with friends to the local park, or a wander through the mall. The day ends with a movie rented from the local Blockbuster.
A once ordinary day has now become sought-after escapism for burnt-out Millennial parents, who are coping with kids increasingly hooked on addictive technology. Children are chronically online — from streaming content as toddlers to tweens begging for smartphones — even as the warnings over the dangers of social media increase.
And they aren’t alone: their frazzled parents are being bombarded online with parenting “must-do’s” and “must-haves”: from over-the-top Easter and Valentine’s Day baskets for kids to artfully-created lunchboxes, and birthday parties ready to compete with the Met Gala.
But a growing number of thirty and forty-something parents are turning to a new trend – raising their kids like it’s the 90s. This means a nostalgic trip down memory lane with simple pleasures like hanging out over board games, dropping by the public library, setting up a lemonade stand for neighborhoods, and — horror of horror — giving kids the chance to be bored. The phenomenon has become so big that searching for “Raising My Kids Like The 90s” on TikTok leads to a host of videos, which have garnered at least 2.2 million views.
For Courtney Schultz, a 35-year-old, mother-of-two in Florida, raising her children like it’s the 90s means no screen time during the week. She argues that they’re too busy for it anyhow, given her 11-year-old daughter’s cheer practice and her nine-year-old son’s baseball and football practice.
“I’m not against technology. I’m just very much for childhood,” Schultz tells The Independent, noting that she and her husband don’t allow their kids to have cellphones. “I just feel that technology does rob kids of the small window of childhood that they have.”
Schultz’s kids spend their weekends outside, too, with her daughter having her own gymnastics mat in the backyard and her son going fishing at the local creek. If they do get screen time, it’s a small amount of time during the weekend, specifically to watch things they care about, like makeup or fishing videos.
Oregon-based pediatrician Whitney Casares — who runs her own blog, Modern Mommy Doc, where she gives advice to fellow working moms — says it’s important for kids to have self-directed play. But the constant evolution of screens in our homes has all their attention, bringing parents to the new concept.
“Parents are noticing that their kids aren’t developing the character traits they want them to have, like grit and resilience,” she explains. “ I think this parenting movement has come about because people are thinking, ‘What was different back in the day? What was different in the nineties?’ When we were running around by ourselves, and we knew it was time to come in when the front porch light came on.”
While Schultz’s children are barely looking at screens, that’s not necessarily the case for their friends, which can make for some very uneventful playdates. “My daughter had a friend come over, and my daughter was really frustrated because her friend was using her phone so much that my child said, ‘I can’t even talk to her,” the parent explains.
Chelsea Delgado, a mother of three kids — ages seven, five, and two — in Arizona, is also raising her children like in the 90s, with their afternoons and weekends spent outside. This means filling her backyard with activities from her childhood, including a trampoline, wiffle ball, and a basketball hoop.
Delgado and her husband tell their children that they have to earn their screen time, which is only an hour a day on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Screen time is given to them after they finish their assigned chores – helping keep the house clean, and also doing homework. If they don’t complete the task or get in trouble at school, they lose 10 minutes or more of their allotted online time.
“I wanna keep them grounded in reality versus keeping them online or on a screen,” the 33-year-old tells The Independent. “I just want to have them be more active, and I feel like that’s a healthy approach for our family.”
Research has found that excessive screen time among kids is on the rise. A 2019 study in JAMA Pediatrics showed that 87 percent of children, between the ages of two and five, exceeded an hour per day of screen time, the recommended amount from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Schultz believes that raising her kids with little to no time on screens, like she had in her 90s childhood, has helped them become good communicators. In addition to being outspoken, her nine-year-old and 11-year-old are not shy around adults.
“They’re not the kids who get on their phones when we go somewhere and don’t interact,” she says. “If we sit down for dinner, they know they need to talk to the friends and family around. If we’re ordering food, they need to order for themselves.”
Similarly, Delgado credits her children’s social skills to minimal screen time and more outdoor activity. In fact, she said that when her kids have too much time on screens, they’re more emotional or agitated than usual. When the TV is off, it makes for a more peaceful home. However, this doesn’t change the fact that she’s gotten some pushback from her seven-year-old son, since his friends get to use an iPad after they finish their homework every day.
“He’s like, ‘Well, that’s not fair!’ And I have to explain the benefits of being active and being together versus sitting on a screen all day,’” she says. “So then he’s like, ‘OK, you’re right. I do want to be better at soccer. I do want to be fast and strong and use my brain in different ways.’”
Neither Delgado nor Schultz plans to give their children smartphones until they’re at least 14, with Schultz banning her children from joining social media until age 18. Schultz is also afraid of the day that her kids get phones, confessing that she’ll then become a helicopter parent, due to concerns about what they could see online.
Casares acknowledges to parents that raising kids like it’s the 90s isn’t an easy task, and we can’t pretend that technology doesn’t exist. Instead, kids can find ways to make it a part of our outdoor time, like biking with smart watches on and playing tag with rechargeable toy laser guns — devices that never existed back then. And prioritizing outdoor time over screen time is something that parents have to ease into.
“Giving your kids the opportunity to be outside is about teaching them how to take care of themselves for a lifetime. If you feel like it is really an uphill battle to get your children to use this type of play, try with just really small increments of time and build on that, over the course of days, weeks, months,” she explains.
“Because you really are training a muscle that our kids don’t know how to use very often, and we’re having to teach them over time.”
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