Background of the Study: What happens when childhood is lost too early? In this study, the children of yesterday and today are compared from the perspective of seven adults of different age, sex, professional training, and nationalities, interviewed about their own childhood – how they could define it in one word and who had the strongest impact on it – and with the way they see kids today. The goal is to identify the similarities and differences between childhood and children of yesterday and today in order to find remedial solutions.

Method: The method used in the study is qualitative, and the technique used is the interview.

Results: Childhood means authenticity, victory, joy, family, outdoor play, freedom, sadness, and flight; parents and grandparents had the greatest impact on childhood. Compared to the children of yesterday, today’s children are both happy and unhappy. If yesterday’s children were happy, fulfilled, modest, contented, grateful, respectful, simple, but also under terror and “on guard”, today’s children are creative, smart, critical, brave, beautiful, informed, intelligent, free, wonderful, nonchalant and precocious, but also absent, weird, gullible/naive, confused, disoriented, selfish, without a role model, frustrated, unaware, uncommunicative, uneducated, not confident in themselves, dissatisfied, helpless, unruly, naughty, bored, spoiled, rebel, and terrorist.

Conclusion: Remedial solutions should address the causes that led to these mutations: broken families, social media, and technology.