Just because you carried Baby in your womb for 9 months doesn’t mean you will magically understand why, in 16 years, they will like the strange clothes or listen to the unfamiliar music that they do. This age gap between you two is going to cause a pretty interesting difference in childhood experiences. In the same way that Baby won’t be able to understand what it was like using a flip phone, you won’t totally really understand different things are for them, no matter how closely you keep up on current trends. Here are a few things that will be different for Baby growing up.
- Baby will never have “I couldn’t find a phone to use” as an excuse not to call you as a teenager
Instead, they may say “I forgot to charge my phone,” but by then, who knows? You’ll probably have the ability to track their battery life, too, if you want. - Every science class they ever have will debate whether or not Pluto is a planet
Pluto might be a planet again now (or has it changed back again already?) but you can bet that Pluto’s changing status has been a source of stress for every science teacher Baby will ever have. Curious what stance they will take on the subject? Give it a few years, and you’ll probably find out! - The phrase ‘turn of the century’ will mean something totally different
Remember when your history classes talked about the turn of the century and meant the industrial revolution? When Baby talks about it, they will mean your adolescence, or young adult years. Now there’s a happy thought. - Baby and their friends will have to find a new “apocalypse” prediction to live through
You had Y2K and the end of the Mayan calendar – what will Baby have to fill the time with before the heat-death of the universe comes in a few hundred thousand millennia? - They will be endlessly google-able
Sure, googling you might bring up a few mentions in the local paper during your childhood, some embarrassing pictures from college, and every social media account you’ve ever put together and abandoned, but your online footprint has nothing on what Baby’s will be because their internet presence won’t start with their social interaction, it’ll start with yours – which means their online presence could have started before they were even born. And even if you’re being relatively conservative about posting to Instagram every time they do something even moderately adorable, there’s no guarantee that the parents of their future friends, or even boyfriends or girlfriends, are doing the same.
