In an evening journalism class in 2009, just after a teacher declared that handwritten letters were a thing of the past, a student raised her hand to say she still wrote them to a friend.

Surprised, the teacher asked if she had not heard of email. The student wrinkled her nose in hurt pride and said she had, but she wanted to keep snail mail alive.

Even then, we had begun ‘unwanting’ the new ways that made communication faster and easier. Older people spoke wistfully about waiting for the bicycle bell from down the street that signalled the arrival of the postman – bringing news from someone dear. As millennials, already losing the magic of landline phones and music on tape recorders, we longed for that feeling too. But we did not quite think we had lost our childhoods simply because we could connect sooner, or send an email.

Gen Z, born into a world already clutching technology, sometimes does.

Writers in their early and mid-twenties have begun writing poems and essays about missing out on the childhood their parents had – one that unfolded before smartphones entered every pocket.

“I sit and I scroll and I rot / And I post on the internet how the internet has failed us / so that I may not fail my internet presence. I think our parents were right. / It was the damn phones,” writes 22-year-old poet Kori Jane Spaulding in her poem It Was the Damn Phones. Her recital of it on Instagram went viral last year, with many of her peers echoing the same frustration.

Another Gen Z writer, Freya India from the UK, writes about anemoia — nostalgia for a time one has never experienced. In her essays, she longs for a 1990s childhood that had “something communal, something joyous, something simple”: reading magazines, playing board games, waiting for a new vinyl.

“I even have a sense of loss for experiencing tragic news without being drenched in endless opinions online,” she writes in her essay A Time We Never Knew. “I am homesick for a time when something horrific happened in the world, and instead of immediately opening Twitter, people held each other.”

The angst is not entirely misplaced. In The Anxious Generation (2024), American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the rapid spread of smartphones and social media has reshaped childhood itself, contributing to rising levels of anxiety and mental illness among young people.

You can see this sentiment scattered under YouTube videos showing American high school life in the 1990s. Beneath them, hundreds of comments from Gen Z viewers mourn a childhood they feel they missed.

One writes that watching such videos makes them angry because they have “never had simple, straightforward interactions like this”. Another says: “Not a phone in sight. People actually talking face-to-face. I wish I could have grown up in an era like this.” A third sums it up wistfully: “Phones? No. We had each other.”

In India too, the warnings are beginning to echo. Germany-based Indian influencer Dhruv Rathee recently released a video discussing the harms of smartphone addiction among young people, from sleep disruption and myopia to mental health struggles.

Political cartoonist Rachita Taneja, better known as Sanitary Panels, makes a similar point in her book Touching Grass, encouraging readers to step away from the internet and reconnect with life offline.

Perhaps the most organised pushback has come from the UK, where a couple inadvertently sparked a movement. Daisy Greenwell and Joe Ryrie began urging parents to delay giving smartphones to their children until at least the age of 14. What began as a simple Instagram post soon turned into a nationwide campaign, with hundreds of thousands of parents signing a pledge for a smartphone-free childhood.

Some governments are also stepping in. Australia banned children under 16 from social media platforms last year, imposing heavy fines on companies that fail to enforce the rule. In India, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh have recently announced restrictions on social media use among younger children.

Yet for Gen Z itself, the sense of loss lingers. As many young writers note, their generation did not choose smartphones; they were born into them.

Handing a toddler a phone to keep them quiet may solve a problem at the moment. But years later, that child may grow up to wonder what it cost them.

That question may define the next decade of parenting and policy. For the first time, a generation is looking back wistfully not at what it lost over time, but at a childhood it never had to begin with. If Gen Z is already mourning the offline world it missed, the real test will be whether the adults raising the next generation choose to slow the march of the glowing screen – or simply pass it on.