November 8, 2025
“Millennial parents.”
It’s a term I hear a lot on social media. It's a trend of sorts, an "aesthetic" of people who'd grown up with parents who came of age in the late ’80s and early ’90s, with flip phones, hoop earrings, and Juicy Couture sets. I could never relate. My parents were born in the late ’50s and early ’60s, so while my friends were listening to Justin Bieber and Nicki Minaj, I was riding in the car with my dad blasting Beatles CDs, mom playing Joan Baez.
For most of my childhood, I only knew as much about technology as my parents did. We used what we had, and that was enough. Then the iPhone came out, streaming exploded, and suddenly the world was moving faster than we were. My parents didn’t feel the need to catch up—we already had a VHS player, CDs, and a digital camera. At the time, I thought we were falling behind, but it didn’t really affect me-that was, until middle school, when technology really boomed. In an attempt to keep up with the times, my school required every middle schooler to buy an iPad, and it would be used in all classes, across the board, slowly replacing paper and pencil.
That was when I finally got my own device, and also when everything changed. I became obsessed: learning every feature, customizing every setting, exploring every corner of the internet. And soon enough, my parents upgraded to iPhones too—but it was different for them: it was simply an addition to their life, rather than an interference. However, I began to see the way screens were starting to creep into the gaps where we used to connect. Syahril, Azzahra, and Rohmah (2024) capture this perfectly: “technology has a significant impact on family communication, altering the way family members interact and spend time together.” At the time, I would have scoffed at this fact. "Yeah, but who cares?" my 12-year old self would've said. But slowly, it was creating small cracks in the foundation of what I once thought of as "family."
Family time started going from every day to every other, then to once a week. Movie nights became solo nights: me in my room watching YouTube, my dad in the living room with his documentaries. I didn’t notice it at the time, of course, but Huang et al. (2023) point out that “problematic internet use in adolescents was associated with reduced quality of family communication,” which can affect how connected you feel. Looking back, I can see how screens slowly but surely replaced moments that used to feel special.
November 8, 2025
“Millennial parents.”
It’s a term I hear a lot on social media. It's a trend of sorts, an "aesthetic" of people who'd grown up with parents who came of age in the late ’80s and early ’90s, with flip phones, hoop earrings, and Juicy Couture sets. I could never relate. My parents were born in the late ’50s and early ’60s, so while my friends were listening to Justin Bieber and Nicki Minaj, I was riding in the car with my dad blasting Beatles CDs, mom playing Joan Baez.
For most of my childhood, I only knew as much about technology as my parents did. We used what we had, and that was enough. Then the iPhone came out, streaming exploded, and suddenly the world was moving faster than we were. My parents didn’t feel the need to catch up—we already had a VHS player, CDs, and a digital camera. At the time, I thought we were falling behind, but it didn’t really affect me-that was, until middle school, when technology really boomed. In an attempt to keep up with the times, my school required every middle schooler to buy an iPad, and it would be used in all classes, across the board, slowly replacing paper and pencil.
That was when I finally got my own device, and also when everything changed. I became obsessed: learning every feature, customizing every setting, exploring every corner of the internet. And soon enough, my parents upgraded to iPhones too—but it was different for them: it was simply an addition to their life, rather than an interference. However, I began to see the way screens were starting to creep into the gaps where we used to connect. Syahril, Azzahra, and Rohmah (2024) capture this perfectly: “technology has a significant impact on family communication, altering the way family members interact and spend time together.” At the time, I would have scoffed at this fact. "Yeah, but who cares?" my 12-year old self would've said. But slowly, it was creating small cracks in the foundation of what I once thought of as "family."
Family time started going from every day to every other, then to once a week. Movie nights became solo nights: me in my room watching YouTube, my dad in the living room with his documentaries. I didn’t notice it at the time, of course, but Huang et al. (2023) point out that “problematic internet use in adolescents was associated with reduced quality of family communication,” which can affect how connected you feel. Looking back, I can see how screens slowly but surely replaced moments that used to feel special.
