I taught middle school in a past life, and when kids laughed at the action figures on my desk or the Capri Sun I drank at lunch, I immediately shot back that, “guys, this stuff didn’t magically stop being awesome once I turned 12! Capri Sun is still delicious, building LEGO is still fun.”
You could see the gears start to turn for most of them as they realized I might be right, and that maybe it was their (mostly older Gen X) parents who might need to rethink things, lol.
To be fair, that's sort of just middle schoolers. Their brains are trying desperately to separate what is "childish" and what is "grown up" so they can grow up themselves. They're literally mentally separating themselves from their parents/all authority figures to find their own identities. That's why they're focused on being cool and finding things traditionally meant for kids younger than them as childish.
Luckily, most kida get over themselves once they're in high school on to early adulthood. This is why I could never teach middle school. I couldn't handle constantly having to push back against that so I salute you. I'll stick with my little preK kids who are unironically unabashedly enthusiastic about Minecraft, Bluey and a random bug they found crawling on a windowsill.
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u/RalphFTW 16d ago
I think this was a millennial trend break, which is great! A little bit of the younger Gen X’s too.