I grew up in a small town in southwestern Ontario. About 8,000 people. I could not have imagined what my kids’ version of being a teenager looks like.
That’s not a complaint. It’s just genuinely hard to connect the two experiences.
Where I grew up, going to McDonald’s was an event. You also had to go “into town” with your mom on a grocery run to Vauldi’s in order to score a cheeseburger and fries. Bikes or your feet were the main forms of transportation in my day. If nobody was driving you somewhere, you figured out how to get there yourself, or you didn’t go. Mostly, you didn’t go. There wasn’t that much to miss. So you made friends with the kids who lived close.
My kids have a subway. They can get on the TTC and end up somewhere I’ve still never been. There’s always somewhere to go, always a reason to leave, and none of it requires a parent in the car. That independence would have been unimaginable to me at their age.
The exposure is different, too. My high school was not diverse. My kids go to school with people from everywhere, hear different languages every day, and eat food I hadn’t tried until my twenties. That’s not a small thing.
So in a lot of ways, I think they’re more prepared for real life than I was. More world, earlier.
But here’s what I keep coming back to.
In a small town, freedom came with built-in security. Everyone knew your parents. Your teachers knew your parents. The guy at the hardware store probably knew your parents (he definitely knew my dad). You could get into trouble, but you couldn’t really disappear. The town kept an eye on you whether you wanted it to or not.
Toronto doesn’t work like that. My kids can walk out the front door and be anonymous in about four minutes. Nobody on the subway knows who they are. Nobody on Queen St. knows my name. The city doesn’t care.
That’s the actual trade. More options, less net.
I wrote about something related after March Break this year, that feeling of teenagers not needing the same things from you anymore. The city accelerates all of it.
I don’t think raising teenagers is harder here than in a small town. Different problems, not fewer. The internet closed a lot of the gap anyway.
What I know is that my teenage years look nothing like theirs. The pace, the scale, the sheer amount of everything. It would have felt like too much to me at 16.
They seem to think it’s just normal.
Which is probably how it’s supposed to work. I still catch myself sometimes, watching them head out the door, thinking about how far that is from a bike ride to the edge of town.
More on parenting teenagers at my parenting page.
