They Got to Grow Up Before the World Changed. Your Children Won’t Get That Chance.

They Got to Grow Up Before the World Changed. Your Children Won’t Get That Chance.

Dr. Shafeeq Ahmed

A post has been doing the rounds in senior citizens’ circles lately. It lists the “good things” that happened to that generation: they grew up before instant noodles took over the kitchen, finished their studies before the mobile phone arrived, got married before WhatsApp existed, and retired before AI took over the workplace. It signs off with a cheerful line — that today’s senior citizens are truly blessed, fortunate, and lucky. Read quickly, it’s a harmless bit of nostalgia. Read as a counsellor who spends most days with parents and children, it captures something worth pausing on, and the moment you flip its logic to look at what it means for the generation coming after it, it stops being quite so funny.

Every stage that post celebrates being spared disruption during, childhood, education, marriage, career, happened for that generation in sequence, one at a time, with enough stability in between to absorb each change before the next one arrived. They grew up first, and only afterward did the noodles, the phones, the group chats, and the algorithms show up as additions to an already formed life. That sequencing, more than any single technology it names, was the real privilege the post is describing. That generation earned the right to build a foundation before the ground started moving beneath it.

Now consider a child born in the last decade. There is no “grow up first, disruption after” available to them. Their attention is being shaped by short videos before they can sit through a full paragraph. Their education is unfolding at the exact moment AI tools are rewriting what counts as effort, originality, and even basic literacy. Their earliest experience of friendship and romance is mediated by an app or an algorithm almost from the start, not added on after face to face courtship was already the norm. And they will walk into a job market being restructured by automation before they have even finished deciding what they want to do with their lives. Every stage this generation is meant to move through gently and one at a time is instead arriving all together, in real time, with the ground still moving under the very people trying to grow up on it.

The temptation, especially for a parent, is to assume our children will find their footing the way we did, inheriting values, work ethic, and a sense of relationships mostly by osmosis, by growing up inside communities and institutions that transmitted those things slowly and reliably. But the neighborhood everyone knew each other in, the joint family dinner table, the classroom without a phone in every pocket, the courtship that unfolded over months of actual conversation, these were never just a backdrop. They were the delivery mechanism for the very wisdom we hope our children inherit. A great many of those mechanisms are dissolving faster than we are replacing them.

This is why I keep telling parents in my practice that raising children today can no longer be a passive handoff of here is what worked for us, you will figure it out too. It has to be a deliberate one. Children need to be taught discernment before they are handed a device, not after. They need practice sitting with boredom and difficulty before an algorithm learns to fill every gap in their attention for them. They need real, unscripted human relationships modelled at home, because they may not encounter them anywhere else by default. They need to be raised to adapt continuously, because the stable career ladder we once assumed they would eventually inherit is being redesigned while they are still students.

None of this means the road ahead is bleak. It means it is different in kind, not just in degree, from the one their grandparents walked. That generation earned its calm by getting to grow up before the storm arrived. This one will only find its footing if we prepare it to walk through the storm while still growing up inside it. The parents who understand that difference now are the ones giving their children the real inheritance, not the comfortable assumption that things will simply work out the way they once did.

This is the exact shift I try to help parents navigate in my book, ‘Two Worlds, One Childhood: Raising Kids Who Can Thrive Online and Offline’. It keeps returning to the same question this piece is built around, not simply how do we shield our children from disruption, but what kind of person are we helping them become while they grow up inside it.

If you are raising a child in this moment and wondering how to prepare them for a world that will not slow down to let them catch up, I would be glad to help you think it through — reach out through www.drshafeeq.com.

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