This past weekend, I took my kids out to find a patch of shade beneath some trees.
We spread out a mat, laid out tteok, soft Korean rice cakes, and a few street food snacks we had picked up on the way. Nothing elaborate. Nothing close to a proper home-cooked meal. But sitting there with full bellies under a breezy autumn sky, surrounded by wind and open space, it was exactly the kind of afternoon you wish you had more of.
We did not go far. Just a park near the house.
What We Found at the Pond
After lunch, we wandered around. There was a small, shallow pond, and as luck would have it, four mallard ducks were paddling across it. My kids' eyes went wide with curiosity and they ran straight to the water's edge.
The ducks did not flee. We got close enough to watch their feet churning beneath the surface, their bills snapping at bits of food in the water. It was an unexpectedly intimate little wildlife encounter, the kind you do not plan for and cannot really schedule. In the reeds nearby, a native frog leapt through the grass. A large pond snail made its slow, patient way across the bottom of the pond.
I grew up running freely along streams, catching fish and snails with my bare hands. That was just childhood, unremarkable and constant. The world my kids are growing up in looks nothing like that. Even a simple visit to a nearby park is something they only get on weekends, if at all, squeezed between everything else that fills a week.
For a generation raised on the idea of keeping a respectful, careful distance from nature, being that close to a living creature felt like something close to wonder.
The Pull Toward a Different Kind of World
There are other ways into nature, of course, camping trips, fishing by a river or the sea. Those will become fond memories for this new generation too, in their own way.
But here is the thing I keep noticing. Without a weekend outing, even a modest one to a nearby park, kids will naturally drift toward their own version of nature, the digital, virtual kind. They will disappear into games and videos. And the way many of us adults try to pull them back is by offering the only nature we know how to offer: open skies, real wind, the smell of damp earth after rain.
The moment we walked back through our front door that evening, my kids went straight into their digital world. Screens on, attention gone, in a matter of seconds.
Is that wrong? I have asked myself this more times than I can count.
Without trips, without an ongoing supply of things to be curious about and interested in, the only tools left for managing children become rules and raised voices. And in an era of constant media overload, I genuinely wonder whether control like that even works anymore.
What Screens Do That Even We Cannot Resist
My own family went years without a television in the house. And yet, whenever we encountered a large screen somewhere out in public, a restaurant, a waiting room, we would all find ourselves standing there, transfixed, unable to look away.
Games and video content offer something even more absorbing than television ever did. Deeper immersion. A stronger pull. It is nearly impossible, for a child or an adult, not to get pulled in once it starts.
So I have stopped pretending that willpower alone is the answer, for them or for myself.
What Happiness Actually Looks Like Now
This is the question I keep circling back to. What, really, is happiness, for a generation that is growing up partly inside digital narratives?
Perhaps for them, happiness looks like finding richness within computer-generated spaces. Connecting with others through a screen. Discovering opportunity and meaning in virtual places that did not exist when I was a child. The happiness of the analog generation, and of those of us caught somewhere in between two worlds, is built from a completely different set of materials. Forests instead of feeds. Mud instead of menus.
Neither version is more valid than the other. That is the part I had to sit with for a while before I actually believed it.
Whatever form nature takes for a person, each of us ultimately shapes our own life out of it. Whether you build your memories in a forest or store them inside a screen, the values and the definitions of happiness are yours to construct, not mine to hand down unchanged.
Which means there is no real need for force. No need for rigid control, no constant tug-of-war over what counts as a worthwhile way to spend an afternoon. If something is genuinely more interesting to a child, more joyful, more meaningful to them in that moment, that is worth following, even if it looks nothing like the childhood I remember.
Two Natures, One Meaning
My nature and my children's nature may look nothing alike. Mine is streams and bare hands and slow afternoons outdoors. Theirs includes screens, virtual worlds, and connections built through devices I am still learning to understand. But the meaning underneath, and the value those experiences hold for us, are not so different after all.
So instead of only asking my children to step into my world, to come outside, to look up at the sky, to touch the pond water and feel something I once felt, maybe it is time I stepped into theirs as well. To sit beside them sometimes. To actually look at what they have found in their own digital wild, instead of simply waiting for them to put it down.
I do not think either world needs to win. I think they just need a parent willing to visit both.