At the Kids Table

Ingredients

• Puff ball headbands
• Hour-long YouTube videos of someone else playing a video game
• The current Disney Channel
• Minecraft
• Desperately wanting glasses
• Those Harry Potter glasses that look like rubber
• 100s of Instagram likes
• Selfies as a form of communication

Instructions

Hello, my name is Anna and I am dating myself.

I don't mean relationship dating (although that, yes, is also true). I mean marking my age with a big fat date mark on a timeline so as to say I am older than some people. I know that I am not old. However, I am not the youngest by a long shot. And don't you dare call me a "Millenial" when the definition of the term includes those born into the early 2000's. That includes BOTH of the children I am currently babysitting-- we are NOT in the same generation!! GRR!! Worst term!! Fix it!!

I'll concede: writing the above list of trends/concepts engulfed by today's children & teens was not as easy as I'd imagined.-- Oh, yeah, that's what that list is, if it weren't already obvious: trends of today's youths that confuse me.-- The more I thought about the trends at which I chuckle or roll my "kids these days" eyes, the more I shrugged my shoulders and remembered doing something similar when I was their age (or older; usually older; these kids are advancing at an alarming rate and someone should tell the scientists). However, even after giving these under-18s some slack, some things still remain that I do not understand. I will list these for you as I sip a glass of Merlot with a quiche in the oven and Bon Iver in the background: 

1. 

Listen. I grew up during the time of bandana headbands and tattoo chokers (which are coming back in style noooooo!), so I understand the importance of extreme head(&neck)gear as a child. That doesn't mean that you can stick a giant POMPOM on top of a little girl! They all look like they belong in a Dr. Seuss cartoon-- not in the cute Cindy Loo Who way but instead possibly a tree.

Sad but Real Mid-90's to Early-00's Childhood Comparison: 

2. 

"Stampy" is a motha-fu$#in' celebrity.

I honestly have no explanation for watching videos of other people playing video games. Nor could I easily find it online; my lame Google & YouTube searches for "video game narration," "video game minecraft video," and "stupid videos kids watch" were shockingly too vague and unhelpful. I have no idea what you call these horrid wastes of time! For those who don't know what I'm talking about, picture a kid sitting in front of a computer watching a YouTube video of someone narrating a video game as they play it. Great-- that's it. That's all you have to picture! Minecraft, The Fantastic Four, Call of Duty-- you name it. Lively, animated commentators, many times in character (like Minecraft's "Stampy"), make these simple video-captures seem like animated short movies or even TV shows. Yet, at the end of the day, when you look at it, it's merely a video of a video game with poor audio quality voiceover.

Mid-90's to Early-00's Childhood Comparison: Can think of none. Yes, that makes me feel like a better person. (OK, fine: watching my sister play The Sims-- silently.)

3. Sure. This potentially breaks my rule of "if I had this when I was a kid, then it's understandable"-- No, no, I'm sorry. It doesn't. These shows are not the same. The acting is super heightened; feels like almost its own style now. The shows play for laugh after similar laugh-- probably because there are so, so many new shows made at once! Fun fact: If you look real hard only for a moment, you'll see that Disney Channel shows nowadays must have one of 2 things: A. a fabulous, attractive albeit unrealistic/unexplained multi-ethnically-ambiguous family or B. a superhero-like duo who serve as the most extreme foils to each other. 

Sure, sure all those hair colors. Less believable than the talking dog with a blog this is a real TV show a dog who talks and writes a blog that blog frames every episode.

I've never seen this one. Can you tell why. (Photoshopped LIZARD on head-- this cannot be the real ad.)

Twins Liv & Maddie could not be any less alike: Heaven forbid one of them is a teen-pop superstar and the other-- no, no-- anything else but-- but-- plays... BASKETBALL?! Celebrity and athletics do NOT get along, everyone knows that!! This one hits the duo and the multi-racial family, NICE WORK!

Went back and watched a few more snippets of this show and found exactly what I thought I remembered: 1 composed beauty and 1 neurotic ungraceful friend to balance each other out while both being silly and adorable-- but never as silly or adorable as the other. 

Le sigh. Where are the sitcoms filmed without a "live" (heavy air quotes) audience-- shows with some substance? Why is there this off-putting, heightened form of acting in which everyone looks like they're either playing for a laugh or about to scream? Where are the 2 new shows, as opposed to 4 or 5, that came out each year and included hearty animated series? Where is Even Stevens?! 

Mid-90's to Early-00's Childhood Comparison: Again, I find myself here--

--but only because I remember that, even as a kid, I recognized some weird acting choices. However, I stand by Lizzie McGuire as the first Disney show to establish their now recognizable colorful exaggeration of today's fashion. (Also, damn, man-- this show was real. Y'all know what I'm talkin' about.)

4. 

Do not get me wrong: I think Minecraft is the shit. Officially, it's "a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine." It's encouraging creativity and inspiring design and engineering skills, and I've seen kids build impressive structures on an iPad that I'd never have the patience or eye to create. Some kids even draw out their Minecraft blueprints in notebooks instead of playing the actual game! (Then they go play the game.) I love that kids find design cool! And yet. Minecraft confuses me. From an outside perspective, I don't understand how these kids who grew up with 3D TVs and hoverboards started playing a game that's PIXELATED ON PURPOSE. It looks like someone stretched out the bits of Mario! Don't get me wrong-- I'm 100% for harkening back to one's roots, celebrating previous decades, and embracing a nonconformist aesthetic. But look:

Straight outta nineties. Again, big fan. I merely don't understand how it succeeded-- solely based on today's high expectations of graphic quality-- so that's why it's on the list. Oh, and the fact that there's a mode where you can kill other players and zombies with the same old video game violence, but hey that's me.

Proud Mid-90's to Early-00's Childhood Comparison: Obviously The Sims. God complex fulfilled. (Putting my hand-vote in the air that Minecraft is better, though. Feel free to call me with questions/concerns.)

5./6. 

Glasses were not cool when I was 6 and threw a temper tantrum at the eye doctor's and my mom threatened to pick out the ugliest pair of glasses if I didn't choose one. (Guess who didn't choose one.) Now, my eye doctor tells me of children who try to lie and cheat their way to an eyeglass prescription. As someone whose demeanor and, dare I say, social ability actually changed when she started wearing glasses, I will never understand that. 

Yet, I am comforted when I see a certain style of kids eyewear, as I'm guessing these kids did not cheat on their eye exam:

 

I've seen an astounding number of kids, usually small & holding the hand of an adult on the Upper East or West Side, wearing these silicon flexy-looking Harry Potter glasses of a wide variety of colors. Perhaps there's a reasoning behind it. No way will they ever catch on.

(Don't quote me on that in 2030 when I'm wearing them on the cover of Vogue. Who knows how I got there.)

Mid-90's to Early-00's Childhood Comparison: To wanting glasses? I don't know, we voluntarily subjected ourselves to dial up internet? Is that a similarly long and confusing way to be cool?

7. 

My cousin (13), my mini-me (15), and one of my best friend's sister (16) each have Instagrams that receive an astounding amount of likes per picture-- astounding because I have no reason to believe they're being trolled or spammed to receive these likes, because they don't hashtag anything. It seems like the young have taken to Instagram at a more astounding rate than we took to Myspace or Facebook: each of these everyday, stupid posts have at least 50 likes and 5 comments-- minimum! My youngest cousin? Her minimum is 100 likes, 20 comments. Most of them are the types of photos we elders would post on Facebook-- the posed shots with friends, the poor quality yet high brag potential shots, etc.-- and, of course, the selfies. Maybe they'll never need Facebook. Maybe they'll never even need texting-- as I'm pretty sure they all communicate through selfies. This week I saw one of them sit in the same position taking a selfie for over a minute straight, and it was way too earnest and invested to not find annoying. This new species is confusing.

By the way, I removed the following off of my ingredient list:

• Egregious disrespect of the English language: "tbh imysm your mean but ily... bms duh" "frick u bc ur hot" "hmu sumtime" "u say thx to him but not mine smh"

Because, at the end of the day, I couldn't pin this on only today's kids... it's all ages, sadly. When I look at the jumbled letters above, I see jumbled letters (and the reason I'll always have a job as an ACT tutor). Plus, I remember-- if I dig deep into the caverns I've marked with "Deadly!" signs in my mind-- once upon a time using a whole lot of "LYLAS." I do believe I always capitalized it. I mean, if we're going to shorten English, at least treat it like an acronym and capitalize each letter. Or, hey, maybe capitalize simply the first letter of a sentence, or, you know, use some punctuation every now and then, or, hmm let's see, write a LEGIBLE sentence. If this is a time saving issue-- screw that, no way is it a time issue, having seen how fast kids type!! 

Haunting Mid-90's to Early-00's Childhood Comparison: Probably when we all stopped talking to people with our mouths and started communicating with Myspace. 

I felt immediate anxiety upon looking at this.

Kids Say the Darndest Things was hilarious to adults in the 1960s who couldn't believe what came out of these kids' mouths, which was mainly adorably naive mistakes about names of presidents, biblical stories, or what their parents did. Unfortunately, this show doesn't need to exist anymore, seeing as we are bombarded 24/7 with stupid things kids, teens, and everyone in the entire world says online. It's probably for the best, though. It'd have a hard time competing with much better unscripted reality content like "Couples Watch Themselves Kiss In Slow Motion."

Kids are confusing. But so are we. (I just learned what Coleco was.)