17 Struggles From Your Childhood That Your Kids Will Never Appreciate

Published on June 21, 2016 at 4:44 PM

I feel extremely lucky for having grown up in the '90s — it was an exciting time to be alive. However, I navigated through my childhood as the world navigated through fast-paced technological changes, which brought on some hardships. When I was a kid, the internet was a rare unicorn, phones were attached to walls, and video game cartridges were the size and weight of bricks. There are so many parts of growing up in that time that our kids won't ever have to go through — the struggle was real, and they'll never understand.

Read through for 19 struggles you faced as a kid that your children will be spared from.

Reading your mom printed-out directions from MapQuest during a drive.

And silently freaking out when you realized you made her miss a turn.

Sifting through a portfolio or stack of CDs to find the one song you wanted to listen to.

And then repeating the process three minutes later when that song ended.

Flipping the cassette in the middle of a jam sesh to get to the songs on the other side.

It always killed the vibe.

Waiting until your mom got off the phone to call a friend.

And then having trust issues over whether or not she was listening to your call.

Setting up a place to meet your friends to play and waiting for everyone to get there.

And dealing with the ultimatum that inevitably followed — did you leave behind the person who was 10 minutes late to fend for themselves? (Or worse, you were that person who got left behind and couldn't find your friends for hours.)

Racing home on your bike before the streetlights turned on.

And the panic of not making it in time that came with it.

Having to manually rewind your favorite movie.

And getting annoyed with yourself or a sibling when you popped in a video and the credits came up first.

Saving your schoolwork to floppy disks.

And then promptly losing or breaking them at the bottom of your backpack.

Waiting for the TV guide to scroll so you could find the Saturday morning cartoons.

And then missing it and having to wait for everything to circle back because you looked away for literally a second.

Dealing with your Walkman skipping every time the school bus hit a bump.

And trying to fit it into your pocket while you were walking.

Waiting a week for your disposable camera photos to develop at CVS.

And then finding out that every picture was overexposed, blurry, and off center.

Blowing on video game cartridges to dislodge the dust.

Because no play date was complete without Mario Kart 64.

Dealing with your mom’s wrath when you accidentally taped over a home video.

Or worse, your parents' wedding.

Trying to play your Game Boy on a nighttime road trip by the light of the streetlights.

You hoped and prayed nothing huge happened in between the lights.

Waiting for the internet to dial up.

Only to be booted off as soon as you were connected because someone picked up the phone.

Wanting to talk to your friends up in your room, but the one phone was in the kitchen.

And if you so much as tried to stretch the cord all the way up there, your mom would scream at you.

Texting your friends to hang out with T9.

And dying inside a little bit every time you passed the letter you wanted and had to hit the key four more times to get it back.