Remember summers when you were a kid in the 1990s? Behind the brainrot doom-scrolling fog, there are memories of summers spent outdoors. In my hometown of Chicago, that meant running around public parks playing made-up games, setting off (probably illegal) fireworks on the Fourth of July, and my mom having only a vague idea of where I was at any given time. This is how most of us who grew up before the internet stuck its talons so deeply in our personal lives. We were wild, we were unsupervised, we were… feral. But are the kids doing that now? Should they?

The term «Feral child summer» has been trending on TikTok this season, and it’s all about letting your kids, from elementary school to adolescence, roam wild outside all day instead of being cooped up with Cocomelon. It’s a throwback to the way the current generation of parents were raised, in a pre-Internet era. The sentiment behind the trend seems to go, «If we turned out okay, then why wouldn’t our kids?» But more than just a catchy phrase, it speaks to the way millennials have become disillusioned with social media, something they invented and once embraced, and offers a parenting style that’s nostalgic as well as healthy.