It caught me off guard. My oldest son, now sixteen and firmly in the “don’t make a big deal out of anything” phase, casually asked if we were going to do a family walk on Thanksgiving. It was something we used to do when the kids were little, mostly due to needing something to do when all the usual options were closed. You know the walk. A post-breakfast shuffle through a local neighbourhood, everyone bundled up, and ideally enjoying themselves.
One would think the request was sarcastic, but he was serious. It seemed he wanted to relive it. A family walk. The same one our boys would protest if we asked them over the past few years. No, we were not forcing them into manual labour. Just a walk where they would have to be near us, and maybe have to talk to us.
It made me laugh, but also stop and think. Was he already feeling sentimental? Was he getting caught up in some good ol’ nostalgia at 16? Or am I classically overthinking it as a parent does?
Well, let’s do a deeper dive.
Why would a teenager, with so much ahead of him, feel nostalgic for something so simple, so recent?
Turns out, there’s some science behind this surprising wave of teenage sentimentality. Studies from the University of Southampton (Sedikides et al., 2008) found that nostalgia isn’t just for the middle-aged. It’s a universal human emotion that helps us build identity, manage change, and feel connected when life feels uncertain. And if there’s any phase of life packed with uncertainty, it’s adolescence.
Teenagers are, in a sense, time travellers. Their brains are still wiring up, especially the prefrontal cortex, the part that manages planning and self-reflection. So they spend a lot of time ping-ponging between who they were and who they’re becoming. According to research in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (Pfeifer & Berkman, 2018), this self-awareness surge makes them both hyper-critical of the present and deeply sentimental about the past.
In other words, my kid wasn’t just reminiscing for fun. He was looking for a foothold, something familiar to steady him in the middle of the identity earthquake that is teenagehood.
Or, he just wanted to go for a walk and said it out loud before thinking. Maybe it’s both?
When kids are little, we parents hold the script: we set routines, traditions, and memories. As they grow, they start rewriting the script themselves. But sometimes they flip back a few pages to check where the story started. Those family walks, movie nights, and Trivial Pursuit matches aren’t just random moments to them. They’re emotional landmarks, reminders of safety, belonging, and predictability.
So, yes, we went on that walk. It wasn’t as picturesque as I remembered. The boys walked a good 20 feet in front of us, and the air had that familiar crispness of a Canadian October. But somewhere between the silence and the laughter, I realized this wasn’t about nostalgia for the past; it was about carrying it forward. Could that be the point? Have I solved parenting? Probably.
The magic isn’t in the memory, it’s in showing up again, even when everyone’s pretending not to care.
Maybe that’s the secret to raising teenagers: they don’t always want to go back, but they do want to know the good stuff will keep showing up, even as everything else changes. As long as they keep walking — even 20 feet ahead and not talking — I’ll count it as a win.
Have you noticed this with your teens? Also, would they ever go on a walk with you that wasn’t forced? Leave me a comment.
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