Vinay Kumar
We are perhaps the most connected generation in human history. Facebook notifications. WhatsApp family groups. Instagram stories. LinkedIn achievements. Twitter opinions. Endless blue ticks. Endless updates.
Yet somewhere between all this hyper connection, people keep saying the same thing quietly over tea, over phone calls, over tired evenings.
“My son hardly talks.”
“My daughter remains inside her room.”
“They are always busy.”
“We gave everything. Yet emotionally they are elsewhere.”
I listen to my friends and often feel conflicted.
Because I was a daughter too.
And even now, after my parents are gone, some of my deepest emotional memories are not from big occasions. They are from ordinary conversations. Long meaningless chats with Baba over coffee and potato chips. Heated arguments over who would read the newspaper first when his article got published. The childish possessiveness of wanting to see his byline before anyone else did. The familiar sound of Maa moving around the house while we argued over editorials and headlines as if national importance depended on it.
Those moments looked ordinary then.
Now they feel like wealth.
Perhaps that is why I sometimes struggle to fully understand this emotional distance people speak about between parents and children today. I keep wanting to defend the younger generation. My friends’ sons and daughters are polite to me. Warm even. They speak respectfully. They ask questions. They smile. They do not appear uncaring.
So when parents complain, I instinctively argue on behalf of the children.
Maybe they are exhausted.
Maybe modern life is harsher. Maybe they are mentally overloaded. Maybe every generation misunderstands the next.
But then comes the quiet reply from friends.
“Yes, they speak nicely to you. But parents are taken for granted.”
And that sentence stays with me.
I often tell my friends, why don’t you simply explain to your son or daughter that their presence makes you happy? That you miss sitting with them? That small conversations matter to you?
But many parents immediately reply, ‘No, it is not so easy. You cannot explain these things to them.’
And I keep wondering why.
When did our own children become such distant emotional figures that parents feel afraid to speak honestly to them? Why are we treating sons and daughters almost like VIPs, people who cannot be questioned, interrupted or emotionally approached too directly?
Perhaps somewhere parents too have started creating this distance unknowingly. Children should not feel like outsiders inside their own homes. They should be spoken to naturally, argued with naturally, loved naturally. Inside homes, children are not people parents should feel afraid to approach emotionally. They are simply your children.
A relationship becomes fragile when ordinary emotional communication starts feeling impossible.
And honestly, that thought makes me sad.
Because perhaps both things are true at the same time.
Today’s young people are not necessarily less loving. But modern life has normalised emotional fragmentation. Everyone is permanently distracted. Attention itself has become fractured. Earlier, families often had fewer external worlds competing for intimacy. Even boredom was shared collectively. People used to just sit together.
Now every individual carries an entire universe inside a phone.
A child may be physically at home yet mentally elsewhere all evening. Parents too are not untouched by this change. Many parents today are themselves consumed by work stress, financial anxiety, social comparison and digital exhaustion. Sometimes entire families live inside the same apartment while emotionally functioning in separate rooms.
And perhaps privacy has changed relationships too.
I hear friends say, “You have to take permission before entering your daughter’s room.”
I understand boundaries matter. Individual space matters. Every generation evolves. But somewhere I wonder whether excessive emotional caution has also entered families. We are becoming careful where we were once naturally entangled. More respectful perhaps. But also more distant.
Earlier generations often lacked emotional language but had physical proximity. Today we have emotional vocabulary but shrinking shared time.
Children message parents from another room. Parents forward motivational videos instead of talking honestly. Festivals become photo opportunities. Family dinners compete with notifications.
Connection survives. Conversation weakens.
And yet I do not want to romanticise the past completely. Earlier families also had control, silences, emotional suppression and lack of freedom. Many children could never speak openly to parents at all. So this is not a simple story of “good past versus bad present.”
It is more complicated.
We gained individuality.
We lost some effortless togetherness.
Perhaps that is why memories of small conversations feel so precious later. Not because life was perfect. But because attention was less divided.
Even today, when I remember my father, I do not first remember achievements, crises or milestones. I remember conversations. Newspapers spread across the table. Arguments over articles. The blazer he gifted me when I was 21. Familiar voices filling ordinary afternoons.
Love often hides inside repetition.
And maybe one day many children of today will miss even these distracted parents in exactly the same aching way.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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