This is a great “art imitates life” movie, right? There’s lots of nostalgia in this film, and older folks remember well the world of this movie. Could such a movie be made today about early 21st century childhood? What would it be like? What would the personalities be? How about settings? Interactions, emotions, tropes?
by Stony_Shore
8 Comments
I blame the end of free range childhood on the 80’s “missing children” milk cartons.
I just rewatched Flight of the Navigator and realized that the entire premise doesn’t work anymore.
This went for seeing movies as well. How were your parents going to know what movies you saw? They had to work. You had a bike. Movies galore.
It wasn’t possible for most people to be a helicopter parent in the 1970s, and into the 1980s. Not unless you’d literally lock your kid in the house (which wouldn’t work anyway) or unless you had a stay-at-home parent who was with them all of the time.
In the 1990s parents started coordinating with each other to get kids where they “needed” to be, 24/7. Everything structured. Eventually, technology allowed kids to be communicated with while they weren’t at home.
That’s the biggest thing that some people miss: before pagers and cell phones were common, once a kid left home, as a parent you had to rely on your teaching and training of them to get them home. Their fear of punishment in some cases. You had to raise your kids to act smart (or fail to do that) because they needed to navigate the world on a day-by-day basis without you.
We would have checklists. “Go to grandma’s then X, then Y, then Z. If ABC, then LMNOP. The bus is 35¢ so here’s a quarter and two nickels. If you miss the 30, the 31 is fine, it’s just slower, either 30 or 31.” It was good training for being independent because you were literally being trained on the right way to do thing, and the patterns would get reinforced over time. We were Leif Ericson. Kids that came after us, many times experienced the world inside of a car.
Man, I miss the good old days of discovering a corpse and getting a knife pulled on you by a gang versus playing Roblox with my friends
Thank you for sharing. Read the full article [for free here](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/opinion/stand-by-me-stephen-king-rob-reiner-screen-time.html?unlocked_article_code=1.VFA.iqzx.ZtZ4DAiniBhX&smid=re-nytopinion), even without a Times subscription.
“It’s 9pm do you know where your children are?”
Nostalgia for the generation that had to be reminded by the TV that they had kids completely negates any concern for smart phones.
What my dad would tell me any time I left the house:
“Be good. Or don’t get caught.”
Stuff that modern children and adults would find scary these days:
* For pretty much all of my childhood, my parents only knew where I was at 6pm
* My first year at Uni I didn’t have a phone in my accommodation.
* I moved to a different country as an adult and it took six months before my parents had my phone number and an indication I was still alive.
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