Many people try to argue that people born in 1998 and 1999 aren't true '90s babies. I was born in '99 and I have seen and I grew up with every show that my older siblings (who were born in 1992 and 1993) grew up with. Same clothes, very similar toys, same music etc. The biggest difference? Technology.
Most of us grew up like the other '90s babies, playing outside after school until the street lights started to come on. If you weren't home by then, you knew you'd be in trouble. When I was younger and living in Arizona, my sisters and I would occupy our time digging a hole big enough to fit the three of us in our backyard and fill it with water. We didn't grow up indoors on our game consoles and cell phones like other '90s babies say we did. Cell phones were still pretty expensive around 2007 and though many of our parents had Razrs, the closest we had to our own phones were “texters." Any game consoles we had, we were limited on the time we could play on them. Eventually, we got the cheap flip phones that really only texted and made phone calls so our parents knew where we were if they had to work and couldn't pick us up from school. We really weren't that different from our older peers.
Something early-'90s babies seem to forget: you couldn't do much on flip phones; there were a few games you could play, internet wasn't the best, and not every phone was equipped with a camera like it is now. Now it's so easy to immerse ourselves in our phones, but when we were younger, the best we could do was change our ringtones and wallpapers. Many people say since we weren't born sooner, we can't call ourselves '90s babies, we grew up as millennials.
The issue with that argument, if you were born in 1990, you were still only 10 at the turn of the century, so you also technically grew up as a millennial. I hate saying I'm a millennial because I feel like it carries a negative connotation but it's true, we grew up in the new millennium. But this also is based on interpretation since it is hard to define where the millennial generation starts.
Many argue that you're only a '90s baby if you actually grew up in the 90s. I beg to differ. As stated before, we grew up just like those who were born earlier in the '90s.
