It’s that time of year where Mrs. Faber has successfully kept the kids safe through another summer and they are back in school for another year of higher institutional learning.

For our household, it was a summer of deeper austerity and many local trips instead of fancy vacations anywhere. It’s always odd to be a parent in a time that looks nothing like the time when you were a kid. (That sounds like something my father would say.)

It’s never easy being a parent, but times seemed simpler when I was chewing lead paint in my crib. We had 12 kids in a station wagon with no seatbelts, and jumping bikes like Evel Knievel was our form of entertainment. Our generation grew up with the ability to be bored. We were chastised on the dangers of watching the evening news, where it told a story in a two-minute clip and ruined our attention span with a two-minute clip.

I was often told that people would travel for miles just to listen to a five-hour speech from Abraham Lincoln on the current political discourse. Brains today are taught to be bored if a clip from TikTok or YouTube is longer than 30 seconds.

Sitting in the back of a car with only a book and a kid sister throwing up for seven hours was exciting with the thought of getting to the campground and swimming in the lake. Nowadays, the trip for kids is only tolerable if there are enough individual devices to launch a drone strike on the other side of the world.

When I was a child, we didn’t dare utter the words, “We are bored,” for the fear of the response that a calf pen needed cleaning or the butt plates in the parlor were due for a scrubbing.

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, there are some benefits to raising kids in today’s world. They have the ability to communicate at any time with their phones – even though their responses are like an ex-girlfriend who has no desire to talk to you.

“How was your day?”

“Good.”

“What was for dinner?”

“Dunno.”

“What did you do today?”

“Nothing.”

They do, however, possess the ability to find directions on Google Maps as a copilot. They typically surprise me with funny videos or GIFs when they text, and they are excited to try a new cookie recipe they watched on YouTube Shorts.

When talking with friends who don’t have children, it’s amazing to me how kids have the ability to keep you grounded in the fact that you are getting older and the world is rapidly changing. Kids have the ability to adapt and change with technology more quickly than we do. I’ve gone from being told I needed to learn how to do math in my head because I wouldn’t be walking around with a calculator to telling my kids they need to learn how to write as they won’t be walking around with something that will write essays for them. While I’m laughing at my teachers silently in my head with my calculator on my phone, my kids are quietly writing essays with ChatGPT.

In many ways, technology makes us dumber, and yet, it has the ability to make life easier. I’m blessed with amazing kids who are navigating an increasingly complex world, and I sometimes just wish they experienced the frustration of loading an entire essay onto a bad 3.5-inch floppy disk and need to redo it.