The Simple Kind of Freedom
Who wants to be a kid again? We bet you raised your hand. Ironically, when we were young, all we wanted to do was grow up, because adulthood seemed to give you autonomy, a cool car, and a big house. But then we realize the hard way that being an adult also means handling a nonstop stream of decisions, obligations, and background worries that rarely ever turn off. Childhood, by contrast, was all about having fun and being carefree—think book fairs and snow days and making Valentine's Day cards. Feeling nostalgic yet? Here are 20 things every adult misses about being young.
1. Days That Didn't Need a Plan
As a kid, you didn’t wake up already negotiating with your calendar, your energy, and your responsibilities. A day could start with nothing on the schedule and still turn out satisfying because your expectations were simple and your time felt open. As an adult, though, even a free day can feel like it needs to justify itself, but as a kid you were allowed to just exist and see what happened.
2. Scholastic Book Fairs
Few school events generated as much excitement as the Scholastic Book Fair rolling into the library for a week. You'd walk in and immediately feel overwhelmed in the best possible way, scanning rows of colorful covers and novelty erasers shaped like animals. Getting a few dollars from your parents to spend however you wanted made it feel like the greatest shopping trip of your young life.
3. Playing on the Playground
Recess was practically a sacred institution when you were a kid, giving you the freedom to run, climb, and swing for a solid chunk of the school day. Nobody needed a gym membership or a fitness tracker to stay active; the monkey bars and the slide took care of everything. Looking back, it's hard not to wish that adults still got a built-in break in the middle of the day to just go outside and move around.
4. Making Valentine's Day Cards
Valentine's Day as a kid was a purely joyful occasion, completely free of the pressure and expectations that tend to follow you into adulthood. You'd spend an evening cutting out hearts, scrawling your classmates' names on little envelopes, and maybe sneaking an extra candy for yourself from the box. Everyone got a card, everyone felt included, and the whole thing was just genuinely sweet in every sense of the word. What could be better than walking into class and seeing a bunch of cards and goodies on your desk?
Fiona Murray-deGraaff on Unsplash
5. Not Worrying About Money
As a child, money was this abstract concept that adults dealt with while you focused on far more important things, like what cartoon to watch after school. You didn't know what a mortgage was, you had no idea how much groceries cost, and the concept of a credit card bill was completely foreign to you. That kind of financial blissful ignorance is something most adults would happily hand over a paycheck to experience again, even for just a single day.
6. Waking Up with No Pressures
On a Saturday morning as a kid, waking up early was actually exciting rather than something to dread. There were cartoons to catch, cereal to pour, and a whole unscheduled day stretching out ahead of you with zero obligations attached to it. These days, waking up on a weekend usually means mentally cycling through everything you need to accomplish before Monday comes rolling back around.
7. Summer Vacation Feeling Endless
Three months off from school felt like an entire lifetime when you were young, long enough to forget what your teachers even looked like by late August. You had time to be bored, to invent games, to ride your bike to the same spot every single day and somehow never tire of it. As an adult, a week of vacation goes by so fast that you barely have time to decompress before you're packing your bags to head home.
8. Getting Genuinely Excited About Birthdays
When you were a kid, your birthday was essentially a national holiday in your personal world, complete with cake, presents, and the undivided attention of everyone you loved. The countdown would start weeks in advance, and the actual day felt so special that it was almost hard to sleep the night before. Somewhere along the way, birthdays shift from being a celebration to a quiet reminder that another year has slipped past.
9. Snow Days
Few childhood moments compared to waking up on a winter morning and discovering that school had been called off because of snow. There was a particular kind of magic in getting a whole unexpected free day, knowing the world outside was covered in white and the only plan was to enjoy it. As a remote worker or someone who commutes regardless of the weather, the grown-up version of a snow day rarely carries that same delightful, giddy surprise.
10. Saturday Morning Cartoons
Saturday mornings had an entire ritual built around them: waking up early, grabbing a bowl of cereal, and planting yourself in front of the TV for hours of back-to-back animated programming. Networks used to air blocks of cartoons specifically designed for kids, and it felt like the whole experience had been created just for you. Streaming has made cartoons available around the clock now, but there was something special about knowing they were only on for a few hours each week.
11. Being Carried to Bed
Falling asleep in the car or on the couch and waking up in your own bed the next morning was one of the little luxuries of being a child. You didn't have to do anything except drift off, and somehow you'd magically end up tucked in and covered with a blanket. It's the kind of care that feels impossibly cozy in hindsight, and it's exactly the sort of thing nobody thinks to appreciate while they still can.
12. School Lunch Treats
There was an entire social economy built around school lunchtime, centered on trading snacks, comparing what was in your lunchbox, and hoping your parents had packed something worth being jealous of. Fruit Roll-Ups, Dunkaroos, and Gushers carried a cultural currency that's genuinely hard to explain to anyone who didn't live through it. Even a mediocre lunch felt like a fun break in the middle of the day, which is more than most adults can say about eating at their desks.
:kirsch: from Raleigh, US on Wikimedia
13. Imaginative Play
As a kid, a cardboard box could become a spaceship, a fortress, or a drive-through restaurant, depending entirely on what you decided it was that afternoon. There were no rules, no wrong answers, and no one evaluating your creativity or telling you to do something productive. Adults tend to lose that easy, effortless access to imagination over the years, and most people don't even notice it's gone until they watch a child turn a pile of blankets into a castle.
14. Holiday Magic
Holidays hit differently when you're a kid, carrying a sense of wonder that's genuinely difficult to recreate once you're the one doing all the planning, wrapping, and cooking. Christmas morning, Easter egg hunts, and Halloween trick-or-treating all felt enormous and thrilling in a way that's completely tied to experiencing the world through a child's perspective. You can still enjoy the holidays as a grown-up, but the experience shifts from receiving the magic to doing the work of creating it for everyone else.
15. Eating Without Strict Rules
As a kid, food was often straightforward: you were hungry, you ate what you wanted, and you moved on. You weren’t weighing every option against health goals, time constraints, and what you should have done earlier in the day. Adults can develop great habits, but it’s easy to miss the simplicity of meals that didn’t require so much mental effort.
16. Simpler Decision-Making
The hardest decision you faced as a kid might have been which flavor of Popsicle to pick or whether to watch one TV show or another. There was no mortgage refinancing to consider, no career pivots to weigh, and no complicated life decisions keeping you awake at 2 a.m. The mental load of adulthood is very real, and plenty of people would gladly hand it back in exchange for just a week of only having to decide what to have for a snack.
17. Homework vs. Actual Work
Homework felt like a massive burden at the time, but in hindsight, it was fairly contained: you finished it, turned it in, and it was done. Work as an adult rarely has the same clear endpoint, and the boundaries between professional time and personal time have a way of blurring together indefinitely. At least with homework, the weekend still felt like it genuinely and fully belonged to you.
Jessica Lewis 🦋 thepaintedsquare on Unsplash
18. Being Taken Care of When You Were Sick
Getting sick as a kid meant spending the day on the couch under a blanket with soup, ginger ale, and someone checking on you every hour to make sure you were comfortable. There was almost something cozy about the whole arrangement, especially if it meant a day off school with the TV all to yourself. When you're an adult and you get sick, you typically still have to handle your own responsibilities while also trying to remember to drink enough water and rest.
19. Field Trips
Field trips were a chance to escape the routine of the school day and go somewhere genuinely interesting, whether it was a natural history museum, a nature center, or a historical site nearby. The yellow school bus, the permission slip your parents had to sign, and the brown bag lunch all added up to something that felt like a real adventure. There's no adult equivalent that quite captures that feeling of getting an officially sanctioned day away from your usual surroundings and routine.
20. Unbothered Confidence
Kids have a remarkable ability to just do things without overanalyzing whether they're doing them correctly or worrying about what everyone around them thinks. You'd sing at the top of your lungs, dance in the middle of the grocery store, or wear a full superhero costume to the park without a second thought. That unselfconscious ease tends to fade as social awareness sets in, and most adults spend years trying to reclaim even a small fraction of it.
