I miss the childhood we willingly gave away

Flowers are popping up everywhere, and so are those viral Facebook posts about how great it was to be a kid in the good old days.

Remember how we’d hop on our bikes and stay gone until the streetlights came on? Forget video games—we spent our time playing kickball, catching lightning bugs, and drinking straight from the hose. 

The subtext is that those weren’t just simpler times, but more wholesome times for children. We weren’t growing up too fast. We weren’t hemmed in and hovered over. We were free and carefree. 

Nostalgia tends to erase complexity. The complex truth is that no matter when or where it happens, childhood is rarely carefree.

Youth was never armor against trauma. School was never sanctuary from cruelty or disappointment. Kids have always had to endure difficulty and upheaval, bullies and mean girls, crushing failures, broken hearts. If there’s anything worse than enduring those traumas yourself, it’s watching your child endure them, knowing they’re inevitable and therefore must be endured. 

I miss the days when children weren’t slaughtered in gun-saturated neighborhoods and mowed down by strangers in shopping malls and movie theaters and grocery stores.

I miss the days when preventing gun deaths was the responsibility of legislators and gun owners, not teachers and children locked inside “hardened” schools. I miss the days when a K–12 education in the United States didn’t include learning to hide from people who hunt to kill.

I miss the days when a mom cleaning out her six-year-old’s backpack wouldn’t find what a friend of mine found and posted on Facebook: the crayoned self-portrait of a little girl traumatized by active shooter drills.

I doubt a single American thinks it’s healthy for kids to live this way. We never should have let it get to this point. Shame on us for not pushing back harder against the NRA’s propagandized version of freedom, and for letting extremists rob our children of the true freedom we enjoyed.

Last week was the first anniversary of the Covenant School shootings. Let’s honor the victims and their families by undoing the damage we’ve done.

Allison
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