“Be home when the streetlights come on.”

The familiar version of childhood goes like this: a bicycle, a friend’s door and a vague instruction to be back for tea. No messages, no live location, no group chat to agree a meeting point.

There was a practical simplicity to knocking on a door and asking whether someone was coming out. Plans could be small and local. If nobody was in, you tried somewhere else.

It is tempting to turn that into a verdict on the present. But memory is a generous editor. It keeps the sunny afternoons and quietly loses some of the boredom, inconvenience and worry.

Today’s children have different freedoms. They can stay close to friends who move away, explore interests nobody nearby shares and learn things that once required the right book or the right person. Those are real gains.

At the same time, being reachable all the time changes the feeling of time to yourself. A quiet afternoon can fill with notifications before anything much has happened.

Perhaps the useful question is not which generation had the better childhood. It is which bits we would like to keep. Unhurried play. A little independence. Space to be bored. And, now and then, an afternoon that does not need to become a photograph.