Tamagotchis Weren’t Just Trendy Toys But Also Taught Young Millennials These Life Lessons
If you were a kid in the 1990s and 2000s, there’s a good chance you had a Tamagotchi that you carried around in your pocket or had hanging off your backpack. Or, at least, you really wanted one.
If you don’t know what Tamagotchi is, they were little handheld digital pets you were responsible for caring for. Tamagotchis came in the form of small egg-shaped machines with tiny digital screens and three buttons you used to take care of your pet.
Tamagotchis are the size of keychains, and most kids wanted one in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While there have been different “generations” of Tamagotchis, the premise of them has remained the same.
Your Tamagotchi begins as a small egg, and you are responsible for helping it grow into an “adult” creature by feeding it and training it routinely, like a real pet. If you didn’t care for your Tamagotchi or forgot about the toy, your pet could “die,” and you’d have to restart your device.
While Tamagotchis were mostly considered fun and trendy back in the day, people often underestimate just how much we learned from them as children and how they inspired a generation of kids to educate themselves in caring for something else.
If you had a Tamagotchi, here are some valuable life lessons you probably learned from your experiences with it.
Patience is key
A lot of kids became extremely anxious while waiting for their Tamagotchi to grow and evolve.
However, the longer they had the toy, the more they realized that patience is key to growing as people or waiting for others to grow.
Grenar – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
The beauty of responsibility
Many kids aren’t ready for real pets when they’re so little, and parents still end up taking on the bulk of the responsibility. And that’s understandable, as some kids with pets are so little that they can hardly feed them.
Therefore, Tamagotchis were an excellent tool for teaching young people about the responsibilities of being a caretaker without risking the life of anything living. It was a great way to learn how being consistently responsible can benefit the lives of others, even if they were behind a screen.
Death is a part of life
Not only would Tamagotchis “die” because their “owners” forgot to feed them or weren’t taking proper care of them, but they would also pass away due to old age.
That taught children caring for the digital creatures that death was a part of every life cycle, and no matter how sad it is, we have to accept it.
Be diligent when you’re sick
Tamagotchis had the capability of getting sick, and when that happened, you’d have to give it medicine, or else it could meet its demise. Therefore, it was very important to give your Tamagotchi its medicine whenever it was sick and do so promptly. So many kids can’t stand taking medicine when they don’t feel good, so the toy served as an important reminder.
It’s okay to let things go
A lot of millennials can remember the time when they finally decided to let their Tamagotchis go. While we never want to neglect the care of a living creature, things like toys and devices come and go throughout our lives so often, and we must remember that it’s okay to move on from something.
If you had a Tamagotchi as a kid, what was your favorite thing to do with it?
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