“Was color TV around when you were a kid?”
Color television was invented in 1953. You and I were born well after that. And yet here is a child, whose entire visual life has been 4K HDR, asking whether you experienced colors as a child. They’re not entirely off base in their reasoning—their grandparents did grow up with black-and-white TV, and you are, to them, also old. What you can do now is call your mom and tell her you finally understand how she felt when you asked her if she knew Abraham Lincoln personally.
“Wow, people live that long?”
This one requires context: The child is not reacting to an advanced age. They are reacting to your age, whatever it is. Forty-two. Fifty-one. Thirty-six. To a 9-year-old, all of these numbers represent a span of time so vast, it is barely comprehensible. You have been alive for basically their entire lifespan four times over. You are, by their math, a marvel of endurance. And I have to say that getting older has never looked so good (no matter what they think).
“My grandma loves that song too!”
The song does not matter. Whatever song it is—a pop hit you loved at 22, a slow jam you played on a road trip, a banger you still consider current, a bootylicious bop that you and your friends would drop it low to while wearing your apple-bottom jeans (with the fur!)—it has also found its way into a grandmother’s playlist, and this child has now connected those two data points.
For the record, this says nothing about you and everything about grandmothers having excellent taste. This is the story you will be telling yourself for the rest of the afternoon.
“Is that what people wore back then?”
The particular cruelty of this one is that the item in question is not vintage. It is not a throwback. It did not come from a thrift store. You bought it recently, at a store, with money, because you thought it looked nice. Gen Alpha’s relationship with fashion is complicated by the fact that they are currently obsessed with “vintage Y2K” looks—which is to say, your early-2000s wardrobe is now a vibe, and the threat of low-rise jeans returning is a horrifying reality. (See also: “My grandpa has that same shirt!”)
“Check out my retro skinny jeans!”
The skinny-jean drama has been well documented, but nothing prepares you for the moment a child presents your entire adolescent or early-adult wardrobe as a costume. These were not vintage when you wore them. These were just jeans. The fact that they have now lapped the trend cycle and returned as “retro” means that you are old enough to have personally witnessed a complete revolution of fashion, and that is an honor no one asked for.
“There aren’t nine planets in our solar system.”
Pluto was demoted from being a planet in 2006. If you went to school before 2006, you learned nine planets, memorized nine planets, made a solar system mobile with nine planets and took tests about the nine planets. You thought it was settled science. It was not settled. And now a child who has only ever known eight planets is looking at you with patient concern, the way you’d look at someone who still thought the Earth was the center of the solar system. We were taught this wrong, and we will never fully recover.
“Oh, that’s what smile lines are!”
Gen Alpha already has elaborate skin-care routines and Sephora hauls, so you’d think they’d have a better grasp of what they’re actually trying to prevent. And yet my niece was shocked to learn that smile lines aren’t the cartoon lines over a happy character’s cheeks in anime, but real lines that get etched into a person’s face after years of smiling. She learned that after very closely examining my face and pointing out the lines one by one. But hey, having smile lines is a gift because it means you’ve done a lot of smiling in your life … right?
“Why are your eyebrows so thin in that picture?”
There is no graceful way to explain the Great Eyebrow Purge of the late 1990s and early 2000s. We aggressively plucked them into a thin, slightly surprised arch that we then partially drew back on with a pencil. Yes, we thought this looked good. My Gwen Stefani poster proved it. And now Gen Alpha—a generation that has grown up worshiping full, natural, bushy brows as the beauty ideal—is looking at your yearbook pictures and wondering what weird eyebrow disease we all had.
The worst part? We plucked our brows so much that many of us still have bald patches. Thanks for nothing, Gwen.
“What did you Google on before Google?”
The question contains its own paradox, which kids do not notice. While there was a “before Google” (it launched in 1998 but did not become everyone’s first stop for everything until several years later), there was no “Google” before Google. There was just paper. As in, you looked things up in an encyclopedia. Or sometimes in books that you had to physically get from a library after looking them up in the card catalog and locating by using the Dewey decimal system. Maybe you argued with your older siblings about it. Or, if we’re being really honest, you just didn’t know the thing and went about your day. The earlier version of Google was uncertainty, and we just lived with it.
“Why is the text on your screen so big and bright?”
My phone is set to max brightness pretty much all the time. I can’t see the tiny type otherwise! Similarly, my husband has his text so enlarged that his texts basically come in one letter at a time. So when your kid asks you this, you’re forced to confront the reality that your eyes are not what they used to be. This will certainly happen to them someday but probably not for another 30 years, at which point some Gen Beta child will ask them the same question and the cycle will be complete.
“How old were you when your parents let you have a phone?”
It was bad enough that you didn’t have a personal cellphone until high school or possibly college. But then you have to tell your kids that before that, there was a house phone (yes, only one phone number per house) and that if someone wanted to reach you, they called your home and talked to your parents first.
For Gen Alpha, a phone or tablet is as basic as shoes. The idea of not having one is akin to not having oxygen. Similarly, my kids have asked me why my phone number has a Minnesota area code, and it was a bit surreal explaining to them that the phone number used to be attached to a location and when you moved you got a new one. Until one day we all just decided to keep our phone numbers forever, and I happened to be living in Minnesota that day.
“Why did you have to be home to watch TV?”
I tried to explain appointment television to a friend’s third-grader recently and eventually gave up because they couldn’t grasp any part of what I was saying. First, TVs weren’t portable. And sure, you could change the channel (after looking up the showtime in a physical magazine called the TV Guide), but then you had to watch whatever was playing. To the end with no skipping. And all of this required you to be home, in person, at a precise time (before your brother) and on the correct channel. Otherwise, you missed your show, and there were rarely replays.
Still, some of my fondest high school memories involve sitting down at 8 p.m. every Thursday to watch Friends with my friends.
“What does ‘clipping a coupon’ mean?”
There was a time when saving money at the grocery store required physical scissors, a Sunday newspaper and a small organizational system. The coupons lived in an envelope or a little accordion folder. You checked expiration dates. It was an entire activity. In fact, it was so popular as a hobby that there were entire TV shows about it. Yet Gen Alpha, who taps-to-save at checkout without looking up from their screen, finds this functionally indistinguishable from churning your own butter.
“What’s a voicemail?”
Gen Alpha has its own rich vocabulary for digital life, but voicemail is not in it. Voicemail is what happens when you call someone and they don’t answer, and instead of texting like a normal person, you leave a recording of your voice that the recipient will then feel mildly anxious about for three to five business days before listening to it. (If their mailbox is even accepting new messages and isn’t full.)
To a child who communicates entirely in voice memos and texts, this distinction is simply lost. And don’t even get started on the voicemails left on a separate machine that you attached to your phone and recorded on physical tapes. The horror!
“Why do you put your change in a jar?”
Cash is a relic. Pennies have been discontinued, and nickels probably will soon follow. But it doesn’t matter because no one uses cash anymore, much less coins. But there was a time when coins were so precious that we had special jars, purses, piggy banks, dishes, pants pockets and car doohickeys for storing them. Maybe you still have the jar of change on your dresser, accumulated over years of transactions that didn’t end in an even number.
But just know that Gen Alpha is baffled by your jar of relics. They do not understand why you have it, what you plan to do with it or why you didn’t just tap. Rolling coins to take to the bank is a story you can save for when they’re older and need to understand suffering.
“Why do you have my phone number memorized?”
Before smartphones, you memorized phone numbers—your best friend’s number, your grandparents’ number, the number for the pizza place, your own number, several ex-boyfriends’ numbers (that you still, embarrassingly, have stored somewhere up there). You had to. It was a survival skill.
Gen Alpha finds this deeply weird, like discovering you can echolocate. Why would a brain hold phone numbers on purpose? For what? Chances are, they don’t even know their own phone number.
“What’s a Blockbuster?”
There are now three Blockbuster locations left in the entire world. One of them is in Bend, Oregon, and people visit it the way they visit national monuments. So it’s understandable why a child would be confused if you mention the word or anything about holding videos in your hands. The child asking you this question has never experienced the specific ritual of driving to a store to rent a physical object, rewinding it when you were done, returning it on time or paying a genuinely unreasonable late fee, and arriving to discover that the movie you wanted was already gone because someone else got there first. They will never know that particular helpless fury. In some ways, they are the lucky ones.
Don’t worry, though. Gen Beta is already here, and they will be our revenge!
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