After shifting toward a 90s-inspired parenting style, Daya Fruhbrodt spends a lot more time with her daughter at her local library in Calgary.Sarah Groot/The Globe and Mail
Daya Fruhbrodt remembers the moment that changed how she parented.
Her daughter, then four years old, was eating while she and her husband both sat nearby on their phones. The little girl began pretending to use a phone, too.
“It honestly broke my heart a little bit,” says Fruhbrodt, a Calgary-based behavioural therapist who works with children on the spectrum. “I thought, ‘What are we teaching our daughter?’”
That small moment prompted a bigger shift. Fruhbrodt began looking for ways to introduce the kinds of offline activities that occupied her own childhood in the 90s: more books, crafts, outdoor play and space to invent your own games and entertainment. That has included giving her daughter, who’s now seven, a CD player, with music of her own and CDs borrowed from the library.
Her approach is part of a broader movement among some millennial and Gen Z parents to bring analog experiences back into the childhood experience. But the appeal goes beyond the nostalgia of memories from another era. It raises a bigger question: can parents recapture the wonder, freedom and boredom that have been swallowed up by endless scrolling and content on autoplay?
For Dr. Mariana Brussoni, a professor in the department of pediatrics at the University of British Columbia and director of the university’s Outside Play Lab, part of the answer is giving children more opportunities to take risks.
“A lot of the time [the problem] is that adults get in the way,” she says. “If you just put kids in a playground, they’ll figure it out.”
Dr. Brussoni’s research focuses on what is known as risky play: activities that are thrilling and exciting, where children encounter a level of uncertainty. That can mean climbing higher, riding a bike faster, rough-and-tumble play or exploring the neighbourhood with friends. What feels risky will differ from child to child.
The point isn’t to put children in harm’s way. It’s to let them test their limits and learn to navigate situations where the outcome isn’t guaranteed, in the real world. And when things don’t go as planned, that can be part of the learning, too.
“They learn from those mistakes,” Dr. Brussoni says. “And they understand what happens when things go wrong: ‘The world didn’t crash on my head. I can handle it. I can pick myself up and move on.’”
Those experiences help build confidence, resilience and the ability to assess risk. Children playing outside with friends are negotiating rules, solving problems and making their own fun – all without a screen in sight.
Dr. Brussoni is careful not to turn that into another set of instructions for parents to follow. She says modern parenting can already feel like an exercise in engineering a child’s future through carefully planned activities and constant supervision. She doesn’t want research about the benefits of play to become one more source of pressure.
“I do not want to contribute to more parents being like, ‘I’ve messed my kids up,’” she says.
That is an important distinction in the conversation about analog parenting. Recreating the 1990s isn’t completely realistic.
For instance, Fruhbrodt says her daughter is already noticing differences between her and her classmates.
“Some of the children in her class have smart watches,” she says. “And there are shows and conversations she can’t [enter in to]. It’s definitely that comparison piece. ‘Well, all my friends have it. Why can’t I?’ And it starts so much younger than even when I was a kid.”
Dr. Stacey Bélanger, a developmental pediatrician at CHU Sainte-Justine Hospital in Montreal and a member of the Canadian Paediatric Society’s digital health task force, says the conversation has moved beyond the number of hours a child spends on a device to what they are doing on it and what other experiences may be missing.
“Children often choose screens because they seem more exciting than available alternatives,” Dr. Bélanger says. She encourages parents to make offline activities more engaging, whether that’s reading, cooking together, playing a game or spending time outside.
She also worries about what children may miss when those experiences fall away. When she asks young patients about their hobbies, she sometimes gets a long pause.
“It’s like they don’t have hobbies,” she says. “The benefit is not simply the absence of screens, it’s the presence of experiences that support their development – social, emotional, language and cognitive development.”
Dr. Brussoni adds that these experiences in and of themselves offer something valuable to a child beyond simply trying to eliminate screens from their day: “Joy,” she says.
Fruhbrodt says her daughter has adapted to having more opportunities for independent play. When she’s bored, rather than immediately stepping in, Fruhbrodt gives her daughter a few options – colouring, music, building something – and lets her decide what to do. Her daughter now asks to go outside almost every day, and can spend hours playing with neighbourhood friends.
“I think that independent children become responsible adults,” she says. “For me, boredom is actually a good sign that your brain is going to come up with a solution.”