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It’s one of my favorite 47 seconds of all time.
On the video playing on my phone, a pigtailed toddler gleefully shrieks as she loses a battle with an unruly sprinkler head in a grassy lawn.
It’s a great memory that feels as if it were taken yesterday. But this soaking wet and positively joyful girl—my daughter—is nearly 13 years old and has long since ditched the pigtails. Another video of my younger daughter polishing off a plate of “skabetti” is a close second, and one played just as often.
As parents, it is very much our birthright to capture childhood. The classic go-to for documenting is, of course, the baby book. And look, I tried. My firstborn was the beneficiary of a well-meaning effort to capture and curate milestones in a pastel-colored, polka-dot baby book. It starts off strong but then dramatically tapers off (because life). My second kid has maybe a shoebox with milestones hastily recorded on a Post-it (because second kid).
But I make up for it by saving snippets of their childhood in another way. Like that of many parents, my phone contains lots of videos of my kids. In addition to the delightful sprinkler showdown, there are clips of soccer games, recitals, birthdays. It is a robust repository—hundreds of videos taking up hundreds of gigabytes.
Whenever the time comes for me to upgrade to a new phone, these old videos come with me, thank you very much. I have, at the ready and at any moment, easy access to their early years—from a first encounter with snow to their budding inquiries at dinnertime (“What do badgers eat?” “Were you and Abraham Lincoln friends?”).
Some find the fact that Generation Alpha has such hyperdocumented childhoods to be alarming and potentially harmful. But as long as your knee-jerk reaction isn’t to immediately put all these photos and videos online and you can balance being present in the moment, these gigabytes of still and moving images are an unalloyed blessing.
It’s a privilege to be able to so effortlessly indulge my nostalgia whenever I want. For many adults my age, seeing snaps of our childhood might be limited to whenever we have a chance to visit our parents’ house. It requires some effort to unearth dusty albums from basements and closets. The ritual of sitting together to watch family videos also requires some time. Set up the VCR; dig up the tapes. Rewind, fast-forward, rewind.
There is a redemptive element at play here. My childhood lives in the carefully curated and compartmentalized memory of my mind. There is virtually no record of my own early years, with only a handful of photos and certainly no videos. In the 1980s, the time of camera film and camcorders, my parents didn’t invest in making a record, and the dysfunction of my fractured family life ensured that there were very few moments worth committing to film or ever watching on playback.
But I’m not alone when it comes to my fierce attachment to these old videos. It turns out, the subjects of these videos are kind of obsessed with watching themselves.
My kids eagerly press Play and relive it all: the unmistakable lilt of their little baby voices, unsteady first steps, charmingly off-key renditions of Disney songs, and wary standoffs with anything remotely resembling a vegetable on their plate.
Watching themselves as unvarnished, unapologetic toddlers invites various reactions. “I can’t believe I was ever that little” is a common refrain as they witness everything from conspicuous markers of growth (missing teeth) to their first encounters with mortality (Hamsters 1 through 3).
I can only imagine how this generation will benefit by having such easy access to the images and sounds of their former, younger, unedited selves. Today’s kids will have a much more vivid sense of who they were, what aroused their curiosity, the things that made them laugh, and just how deeply they were loved. In addition to seeing themselves as individuals, they can see themselves in the context of being a part of a family and broader community.
I would have loved to see and hear myself as a young child. What did I sound like? What kinds of clothes did I wear? What was my first reaction to feeling sand on the beach? It’s only natural we would want to draw the through line to the people we are today. But that sobering void is tempered by what I now consider a worthy consolation prize.
In seeing the videos of my kids, I have another view of me. Not as a child, but as a parent. A younger, unsure me. Because I am there too. You can sometimes hear my voice in the videos—cheering, negotiating, coaxing, celebrating, and even making a cameo now and then despite my general aversion to being on-camera. There is separate documentation of my own growth and development alongside theirs; this record of their childhood is very much a record of my developing motherhood. Growing, contracting, learning.
Because in holding close these videos of their Christmas mornings, skinned knees, and breathless laughter, I am just as tightly seizing onto a truth: The stars in their eyes are mine too.
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