Disney World: I bring my kids to the parks, but the magic is gone

• I loved going to Disney World as a kid, experiencing the freedom of the parks.
• Now that I’m bringing my kids, we feel bogged down by apps, crowds, and restrictions.
• My kids don’t know what they’re missing, but the parks have changed so much for me.

Visiting Disney World it was an annual experience of my youth. For decades, my family spent a long weekend in October at Fort Wilderness Campground. We would run through the parks and skip the many resorts and restaurants dotted around the Lake Buena Vista campus.

The Disney Parks It somehow felt futuristic and cutting edge while also being nostalgic and magical. The trips made such an impression that I still wake up every September doing housework with “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” playing in the background or watching YouTube videos of park workers putting up fall decorations.

So when my wife and I started taking our boys to the parks, we fell into the nostalgia trap of hoping their experiences would be the same as mine. Time and the economy had other plans.

A Disney trip takes too much planning now

I never appreciated the high level of planning required to visit one theme park until I became a parent. The length of the travel line and bad weather were my only concerns as a child – with some minor food concerns.

But as a parent, I find myself overwhelmed by the sheer number of pre-visit requirements.

When you pride yourself on your theme park survival skills, nothing will humble you faster than trying to navigate the The Dos and Don’ts of Visiting a Disney Park in the 21st^St century. Visiting a park these days requires weeks of planning, constant communication with everyone traveling in your group. and downloading phone apps just to enjoy certain parts of the park.

Other complications include things like Lightning Lane passesblackout dates, ropes, ride reservations, and premium annual passes—all things I never had to think about have since become standard operating procedures for park visits.

My favorite part of the visit Magic Kingdom i used to see the castle once i walked through the front gate. Now, it’s the bar stool at the resort because it doesn’t require a reservation (for now).

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I wish my kids were freer in the parks like I was

In addition to the annual October visits, I frequently visited the parks through school trips or group events like Grad Nite. I have memories of racing through the parks with my friends, sprinting from ride to ride with minimal crowds to slow us down, feeling like those wild kids in “Pinocchio” before they were turned into donkeys.

The absolute volume of Disney park crowds these days make that notion impossible. Our boys have fewer opportunities to act like wild, unaccompanied minors.

This reality doesn’t bother me too much, especially since I have a feeling that park security would be less tolerant of unaccompanied minors than when I was a kid.

Fortunately, my kids don’t care

Of course, none of these differences mean anything to my children. I have no idea how they really feel when they visit the parks, but I know they love it and I’m getting better at letting them have their own life experiences without comparing them to mine.

That’s okay because those comparisons didn’t matter to me as a kid either. Historians refer to the 1970s and 1980s as Disney’s Dark Agesthe years when the company produced some of its darkest films, and the parks weren’t the top IPs of today. But that didn’t matter to a Gen X kid who watched “Robin Hood” and “Winnie the Pooh” until the VCR ate the tapes.

Visiting the parks felt like stepping into a pocket dimension where all the lands and characters featured by Disney could be seen and touched. The Disney I experienced was proper Disney, just as the Disney my boys are currently experiencing is proper Disney.

Plus, I can feel her eyes rolling up whenever we talk about how much the parks have changed since we were kids.