Specifically, participants emphasized the tech-free qualities of their own objects as more natural, more innocent and more joyful than the gadgets they understood to dominate children's experiences today. In these discussions, technology was a key theme. While the respondents in our study described their own complicated experiences as children, they returned to nostalgic ideas about childhood when the topic of COVID-19 arose. Pre-pandemic childhoods and tech-free toys They often used them to describe diverse and difficult childhood experiences such as the loss of significant others, questions about gender and sexuality, times of worry, bullying or failure and how they exercised agency in the face of rigid educational aims. However, participants did not simply repeat the norms represented by their objects. They might also be said to represent normative ideas about child development and the tendency to view children as precursors to productive adulthoods. A range of objects were shared, including stuffed toys, bikes and binoculars, games and puzzles, drawings and books.Īt first glance, there may be nothing surprising about these choices. Participants were asked to discuss their objects in focus groups.

Our research examines how childhood memories shape the ways prospective teachers and people seeking to work with children understand their roles as future educators.Īs part of our work, we asked undergraduate students enrolled in teacher education and childhood studies programs to select an object-a token, toy or tool-that they believed to represent childhood.

As archaeologist Jane Eva Baxter suggests, toys and playthings may say as much about adult longings for childhood as they do about the children for whom they are intended. Play objects designed for children are, too, driven by nostalgia. Still today, in dominant popular western imagination, childhood is understood to be a time before responsibility, before problems and violence and before knowledge about loss and death. Historically, nostalgia can be linked to childhood and a longing to return to a fantasied state of innocence. Longing for pre-pandemic times may defend against the many losses of COVID-19 and the uneven effects of illness, online learning and access to resources for children, young people and adults. In the unfolding context of COVID-19, yearning to return to life as 'normal' can also produce unrealistic expectations and feelings of impatience, frustration and fear. However, nostalgia reflects an overly positive view of this time, and centers the experiences of those more privileged or protected in society. Some people may even experience an increased longing for the early days of COVID-19, when lockdowns felt like a break from the rush of everyday life. Since nostalgia often brings to mind memories of cherished social bonds and togetherness, it may also help people cope with feelings of loneliness.Ĭultural theorist Svetlana Boym adds that nostalgia disrupts ' the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition' and offers a way of using the past to rethink the present and future.įor these reasons, nostalgia may be especially important for people made vulnerable by displacement, bereavement and mental health challenges. When it isn't excessive, nostalgia can be a productive feeling that provides a sense of continuity, purpose and optimism in difficult times.Īs writer Danielle Campoamor explains, ' nostalgia serves as a kind of emotional pacifier, helping us to become accustomed to a new reality that is jarring, stressful and traumatic.'īut nostalgia can create an overly simplistic picture of the past that hinders attention to the present and limits the imagination of a different future. Nostalgia can be defined as a feeling of longing for a better time in the past that no longer exists and may never have.

French novella childhood nostalgia