Thursday, October 1, 2026
How can I possibly connect with my granddaughter Emi, who is turning 18 in the age of Trump and A.I. and ICE? How can she know me, a boomer with anti-Vietnam War creds?
Social scientists have debated for years whether nature or nurturing has the greatest influence on developing children. Is it DNA or parental influence that determines how the newborn becomes the teen who develops into the adult and then the old man or woman?
Recently I’ve come to believe that the strongest influence on developing human beings is the times in which they live. Try as I might, summoning all the empathy I possess, I simply can’t know what it was like to endure the London Blitz during World War II. Or the Dust Bowl in America, or the Holocaust, all of which changed the way people lived and thought.
The history of our time molds us in indelible ways. As my youngest grandchild turns 18 this month, I realize we must work to bridge the widening generational gap.
This struck me on Sept. 11. I don’t think my granddaughter finds sunny September days threaded with dread. But I do, remembering 9/11 with all its cutting edges. The disbelief. The falling man. The violent collapses. Our firefighters running to their deaths.
Emi was born in 2004. Sept. 11 is history for her, the way the attack on Pearl Harbor is for me — something you read about but didn’t experience. Not the way it was for her grandfather, my husband, who walked home from the city that day, over the 59th Street Bridge.
The times of my life informed me in ways that she can’t understand. And I don’t know what it was like being a young teenager through the awful social deprivation of the pandemic. I have little understanding of her connection to social media and devices that influence her thinking and behavior. The common ground between us is shrinking. I want to be more than Grandma, a real person, a friend to her. I want to understand her interests and fears and how she sees her place in the world.
Eighteen is a big birthday. Emi can now serve in the Army, or adopt a child. I want to know her and her dreams. Even though the historical markers are different. Even though I can’t give her back the sterile years of pandemic isolation, I want to understand it and make the loss of time and experience less painful. I hope we may grow closer in coming years by talking about the times of our lives, and how historic events blended with DNA to make us who we are.
I was a child in the before times — before TV, before A.C., before most vaccines and before there was any suggestion that our own political leaders might undermine the pillars of our democracy for their own financial gain and power. Our experience with media was reality-based, not trickery and misinformation. I took the word of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Morrow as the best version of the truth. When the government said kids needed the polio vaccine, we lined up. We proudly saw America as a beacon of freedom.
When TV emerged, no one imagined that screens would eventually take over our lives. We went to schools where the teachers were widely supported, and we learned to read and write. My parents loved this country without reserve, and we carried that sense of security with us as we matured: that we lived in the greatest, most generous country in the world, the country others turned to for help and leadership.
Emi lives in a country now populated by people who are increasingly dazed by screens and social media drivel. We gave her and her generation a pandemic that changed her forever. She and her friends missed a year of socialization and absorbed the fear filling the hearts and minds of her parents. She is an adult now in a society riven with violence and grotesque public behavior by a cadre of untrustworthy leaders.
She and her friends learn from social media that they must be taller or shorter or quieter or more outgoing.
How will she know that she is enough, and it is her job, whatever she does, to simply leave the world a better place?
Copyright 2026 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com.
