Every January for the past number of years, I wrote a piece called “Opportunity Opportunities” (2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020), basically a bunch of questions about opportunity-related themes I was thinking about.

This year, I’m continuing the focus on questions, mostly because I don’t have the answers, but also because of the non-obvious ways childhood is changing.

Every generation of kids experiences childhood differently.

Many of the changes the current generation is navigating have been well covered and considered (e.g., they are more empowered in some ways, with unprecedented access to information in the digital world, and more powerless in others, with less autonomy and agency in the physical world).

But beneath these surface-level observations, deeper shifts are occurring that deserve scrutiny. I’ve noticed these subtle changes in my own children and my students.

Below are questions that I have seen less conversation about and that I think are worth exploring as they likely have interesting implications for kids, communities, and society.

Cognitive

• How does externalizing memory by default change the texture of human wisdom?

• Wondering used to persist for days/weeks, now answers arrive in seconds. What happens to the capacity to wonder when there is no gap between a question and its answer?

• How does a child whose brain is trained on content that is skippable, scrubbable, and fast-forwardable deal with life experiences that cannot be skipped, scrubbed, or fast-forwarded?

• What happens to humor and culture when the shared reference is replaced by algorithmic fragmentation?

Developmental

• What are the consequences for kids and society when biological adulthood arrives earlier than emotional adulthood?

• Can a one-way parasocial relationship with a creator or celebrity ever replace the friction and growth of a local, IRL friendship?

• How does a child anchor themselves when their peer group is global, but they have no connection to the kid next door?

Sensory and Perceptual

• How does kids’ experience of augmented night/darkness (light pollution and screens) reshape sleep patterns, circadian rhythms, and melatonin production?

• How does experiencing sound through headphones first (e.g., flattened, spatial audio) and IRL second, change a child’s intuitive understanding of how sound travels, where things are in space, or even basic acoustics?

Social

• What it takes to maintain friendships has shifted dramatically. How does friendship as an administrative task alter social patterns?

• How does the developing ego change when social status is no longer a feeling or vibe but a quantifiable metric?

• What are the psychological implications of kids having public and private selves?

• How does conflict resolution change when the default method is asynchronous rather than real-time (messier emotions of face-to-face/verbal)?

Biological and Physical

• What does the change in grip strength (down 20% since 1985) tell us about how kids interact with the physical world?

• If a child never navigates rough terrain (e.g., woods, streams, boulders, hills), how do they learn where they, end and the world begins?

• How does the extinction of our ancestral microbiome—the bacteria we co-evolved with but are losing to modern hygiene/diet—alter the biological foundations of childhood?

Not all these changes are necessarily bad. None of these questions has easy answers, which is why we should think about them. The questions few ask are often the most important. I’ll leave you with the one I can’t shake: how is a child’s sense of autonomy impacted by the inheritance of a digital trail they never consented to?

Until next week, be calm and be kind,

Andrew