Recently, in the r/workingmoms Subreddit, one poster wondered if she stood alone as an elder millennial who doesn’t have a reverential nostalgia for childhood summers. “Am I the only ’90s kid who didn’t have the classic ‘bike around with a pack of neighborhood kids’ summer??” she asked. She definitely wasn’t, but I could see why she was concerned: Generations of young people have been weaned on visions of summer as a catalyst for transformation. But for the ’90s kids who grew up on them, ’80s movies like “The Goonies,” “Meatballs,” “Stand By Me,” “Dirty Dancing,” “The Lost Boys,” “The Sandlot” and many others made summer seem nothing short of life-changing.
“All my favorite movies were like ‘teen on a family vacation gets caught up in local hijinks’,” says Erika, 40, the rare ’80s baby who identifies as Gen Y. “Summer was supposed to be when sh*t happened.” Not for her. “They weren’t awful,” she says. “They were just boring.” So a year or so back, when she began to notice influencers rhapsodizing about planning a “’90s summer” for their own children, she took notice. “Nostalgia is basically substituting what you feel now for what actually happened then, right? I have no nostalgia for childhood summers because nothing happened.”
