this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Do 90s babies really remember Y2K and 9/11?
Trauma, unlike wealth, actually does trickle down. So even though kids don't understsnd where it's coming from, major traumatic events will affect them second-hand.
Being in the UK no one believed me when I was concerned at school after hearing about 9/11. My grandad was in there, and it took us a whole day to get a hold of him to find out if he got out in time... 9 year old me hearing on the radio coming back from swimming after a trip at school that the Twin Towers got hit, I remember turning thinking I misheard it to ask my teacher left to me in the coach "My grandad works in there".
Her eyes opened wide. I got collected early from school by my crying mother early. Then I understood and got worried. No one at my school helped calm me, thankfully I must have looked so clueless and confused anyway. I was an odd kid so no one probably cared or noticed.
Odd day. Don't really need to explain much else.
So in answer to the comments on here saying kids don't remember, of course they do! We didn't just start consciousness and wake up at age 10 or whatever.
You're definitely right, it can affect second-hand, even if the child didn't directly understand.
I wouldn't draw the conclusion that all kids remember it based on your experience. What you experienced was likely very traumatizing.
For anyone your age, even in the US, their main "trauma" was not being able to watch cartoons because the news was on every channel. Unless, of course, someone they were close to worked in or around the towers like in your case.
That's such a shitty take. Plenty of kids my age were freaked out by it eveb if we weren't personally affected.
I was just basing it on the comments I'm seeing from people who were kids at the time. Clearly it depends on age.
That happened during the school day for me. West coast would have been asleep. On the east coast, at least, no kid was nagging about cartoons unless they were out sick in a non-flu month and also particularly stupid.
Granted, I was 11 then, so definitely on the higher end of the 90's baby scale. But there are at least 630 child millenials that very clearly remember that, because our teachers were ordered not to say anything, told us they were ordered not to say anything, and then immediately disobeyed because they felt it was important. They led my entire grade out into the main hallway to watch it live.
I'd had too much of a sense of realism to ever think we were "innocent" or whatever, in order to understand what people mean when they say they lost that. I think this reaction would be more prominent in the middle class than my PTSD-riddled ass. I assume they just mean a lost feeling of safety?
Sitting cross-legged on the floor in the kind of silence several hundred tweens aren't supposed to make, my main emotion was a deep dread. Anyone with a brain in their head knew we were going to retaliate. I didn't want a war.
I also remember Y2K. It was hard to hear anything else. 1999 is the first new year's eve I clearly remember, actually, simply because it was anxiety-inducing in comparison with all the others. Just sat there with my headphones on, not listening to music. I was a stressed out kid.
If you remember 9/11 that's actually one of the things that makes you a millennial instead of gen z. Most people born on/past 1997 don't remember 9/11, myself included.
My partner is only 2 years older than me, but she's a millennial and I'm gen z. It's weird how much those two years do. She can remember 9/11 and there's a lot of other little things you can read about.
That's another crazy thing, in just 4 years, gen z will be in there 30's!
Iirc, the rough delineation is if you remember the challenger disaster = gen x, 9/11 = millennial, covid = gen z, after that = gen alpha.
I was Born '83 and remember chernobyl. Not that i would have known anything about it. But my parents ran out, hauled me inside and said no more playing outside. In retrospective that was quite disturbing it seems.
I was born 94, vividly remember 9/11 on the news and being annoyed no cartoons were on. I remember the turn of the millennium but not specifically about Y2K
I mean, you remember it for being annoying. Others remember it for being traumatizing.
I mean I understood it somewhat, but I also didn't want it to be the only thing consuming my afternoon. It was very depressing and I was only 7. Of course I didn't want to just dwell on that all afternoon. I was also at my nanas at the time so there was nothing else i food do but watch tv till my mam came home from work. So i had nothing else to distract me. But yeah you are right I didn't fully grasp the gravity of the situation at the time. I think watching it through the tv allowed me that kind of separation. Obviously as time went on, those memories got skewed as i understood more of what actually happened, but I still remember that moment of when I went to my namas bedroom tv in hopes of finding a different channel that might be showing something different. I didn't.
You would've been in first grade during school hours lol, why would you have expected cartoons?
Edit: I forgot timezones exist lol
I'm from the UK so it actually happened more in the afternoon. The one thing I don't remember is if it was after I finished school normally or if we were sent home earlier. I think it was the former though
IMO if you were American, you would remember it for being traumatizing rather than for disrupting your cartoons. I'm about the same age as you and it had a huge impact on everyone I knew.
Sounds like you truly grasped what it meant for 3000 people to be murdered in an intentional spectacle
It's almost like I was only 7, shock horror
I remember them, but I was born early 1990, so I'm one of the early 90's babies.