5 ways my kids' lives will be nothing like mine

I grew up before the internet existed. In fact, I was still writing school papers by hand until my middle school years, when Word Perfect enabled me to type instead of scrawl.

In my day, when you wanted information, you went to the library and cracked open a book. In a time before smartphones, Wikipedia, and a million blogs, students could practice deeper learning and generally trust the information they found. Also, we got to enjoy the delightful running of mouths that occurs during conversations when no one can fact-check your claims.

Today, as soon as they're old enough to have regular access to the web via a family computer (and, one dreaded day, their own phones), my kids will have access to answers to any and every question. For the most part, this is great, but sometimes information found online is biased or outright wrong.

The other day at dinner, in the organic course of conversation, my son casually said, "Or maybe he'll marry a boy," as my wife and I opined on the future of a friend's relationship with his girlfriend.

My throat caught as I realized fully what I had long hoped and suspected: My son and daughter will never think twice about the normalcy of same-sex relationships. The US remains far from the finish line when it comes to genuine equality and tolerance, but we've moved in leaps and bounds toward it, even in the 35 years I've been alive.

In my youth, the word "gay" was an epithet hurled about the playground that landed with a sting. My kids will use that term (or the accepted descriptor of their day) as an adjective with all the ferocity of the words "tall," "young," or "blonde."

The Columbine school shooting on April 20, 1999 was not the first such event in American history, but it was the first one that I clearly remember — and it was arguably the first such event of an era of similar horrors. Before that day, I had never once thought such a thing could happen. I was also a freshman in college when the Twin Towers fell on September 11th, 2001.

My wife and I can shield our young kids from the knowledge of domestic massacres and global terror for a few more years, but there's no way they'll make it into their mid-teens not knowing the kind of violence human beings at times inflict on one another.

Statistically speaking, the world is actually less violent today than in decades past, but near-constant media coverage of shootings, bombings, gas attacks, and so forth, the perception of a violent world is hard to avoid.

The modern environmental movement was launched well before my birth in 1982 — it is often considered to have commenced with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's book “Silent Spring.”

But even during my youth, climate change and other such calamities were rarely front and center in the news. Today, we hear about our climate crisis all the time, and the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community is that human activity is to blame for a significant portion of earth's woes.

My four-year-old son has already been alive for multiple record-setting years for global temperatures. And my daughter, born just this past March, will likely live through multiple heat records soon to be set.