My toddler’s behaviour around food can only be described as fickle. Some nights when I make spaghetti bolognese, he laps it up at the dinner table, shovelling the noodles into his mouth with joyful energy and staining the skin around his lips with red sauce. Other times, he looks at his plate with suspicion and mild disgust, poking around the meaty chunks before declaring, “I don’t like spaghetti.”

These words often trigger a response by me and my husband where we’re awkwardly dancing between encouragement (“But you liked spaghetti last time you had it. Why don’t you give it another try?”), trying to play it cool (“You don’t have to eat it, but that’s what’s for dinner”), and masking our frustration and annoyance.

Pour Some Sugar on Me and My Lucky Charms

Of course, the ‘90s were a very different time when it came to views of feeding your family. Parents regularly pressured their kids to clean their dinner plates, “or else, no dessert,” they’d say. Sometimes, that warning would escalate to, “You’ll sit at the table until you finish your plate,” or “You’ll go to bed hungry.” And then if all else failed and you were still pushing around that broccoli: “There are starving children in Africa!”

Did these threats work? Often. Did they leave many of us with weird guilt – or worse, eating disorders – over “wasting” food, even if we were full, for years to come? Absolutely.

Yet, the ‘90s were also a time when so much of what we ate was unhinged. Refined sugar consumption was at an all-time high. From technicolour cereals like Fruit Loops, Dino Pebbles, and Cocoa Puffs for breakfast, to popular…

No swearing. No violent toys. No sleepovers. No mature topics. These are just some of the common rules that a lot of Millennial parents have in their households. It’s not that we’re overly strict. For many of us, we’re simply keen on preserving what’s left of childhood innocence in the digital age. Kids will inevitably learn about a word or a topic on YouTube (hopefully not YouTube 🙏, but likely), and be exposed to online porn 🙈. Preventing or at least delaying that, to some extent, gives parents peace of mind.

But this wasn’t the case when we were growing up.

A Less Innocent Analog Time

For better or worse, parents in the ‘90s were more relaxed when it came to censoring aspects of “real life.” They didn’t have to worry about their kids getting bullied on Instagram, or learning about something they shouldn’t on ChatGPT. There wasn’t a fear of young boys being radicalized by the alt-right on YouTube.

So it wasn’t unusual to overhear dads swearing at Monday Night Football on TV, or telling a crude joke to uncles after a few drinks at Thanksgiving. Moms in the ‘90s regularly gossiped to friends about the latest local cold case, without worrying how that might affect little ears. Everyone knew the names Jaycee Dugard and Michael Dunahee, and parents relied on these kidnapping cases to scare their own kids straight about wandering off in public – or at least my mom did.

There was less concern over kids playing with “violent” toys, too. Every kid tormented their younger siblings and cousins with Nerf Guns, and Super Soakers went hand-in-hand with Slip N Slides. Everyone knows that slap bracelets were…

For the past 10 weeks, I’ve taken my toddler to a gymnastics class every Sunday morning. His level of participation is rather tepid, despite bribing him with a muffin afterwards from the coffee shop next door. So for 45 minutes starting at 9 am, I do a lot of gymnastics in hopes that my enthusiasm will eventually rub off.

We signed up for gymnastics because honestly, I wanted something to get us out the door on Sunday mornings that would help tire him out. Improvement of gross motor skills and having fun are also perks, plus we know three other families joining. Before we started gymnastics, we did swimming, and on Saturdays, he takes a year-long music class. When you take into account his full-day preschool from Mondays to Fridays, my kid has an activity scheduled every day of the week – and he’s barely three.

The Apple Never Falls Far

In many ways, my child is just like me. When I was in preschool back in the late ‘80s, I was featured alongside a couple other high-achieving toddlers in a local news broadcast titled, “Are we pushing our kids too far?” For a week, a cameraman followed me around to ballet lessons and (finger) painting class while a reporter interviewed my mom. The verdict on the program’s titular query? Maybe. And we were certainly an unusual bunch for the times.

Many of my friends spent their childhoods leading much less scheduled and arguably chiller lives. Some of them ran track, others sang in choir, and a few were even involved in Brownies and then Girl Guides, which took them away on camping trips some weekends. But rarely did they…