On a recent road trip, I listened to a fascinating interview on NPR with Roma Agrawal—structural engineer and author of  the book, “Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions that Changed the World.” Those inventions include the nail, spring, wheel, magnet, lens, string, and pump. The inventions we see today are designed using one or more of these basic inventions.

As a child, I spent time each summer with my grandmother on a farm in Mathews County. She loved telling me about the things I took for granted in my city life that she had seen when they were first introduced on the market. It was fascinating learning she had seen the first automobiles, airplanes, Greyhound bus lines to Richmond, refrigerators, gas stoves, electricity in her home, ten-phone-party-lines, radio, television, penicillin (her husband died of pneumonia because there were no antibiotics available), A&P Grocery Store—and the list goes on—until her death in 1969.

Children grow up believing that the items around them have always been there. The only way they will know their history is for parents and grandparents to tell them about their lives when children.

When my three sons were young, there was an invention that had an interesting impact on their lives. As my first child was preparing for preschool, he was learning how to tie his shoelaces—a skill he needed to master to become more self-sufficient. One shoe seemed to work really well, but the other bothered him each time he tried. When buying new school shoes that August, I saw the cutest tennis shoes with Velcro® fasteners. What a saving grace! Getting ready for school was a breeze as my guys slipped on their shoes and pulled the straps across the top without struggling to tie laces. It cut several minutes off preparation time each morning. Velcro® was conceived in 1941 by a Swiss electrical engineer, George de Mestral, who noticed that cockleburs got caught in his clothing and in his dog’s fur while walking in the Alps. It took him years to develop two pieces of fabric, one with thousands of tiny loops and the other with thousands of tiny hooks. The word Velcro® was a combination of the words velvet and crochet. By the 1970s and ‘80s, all kinds of things were being held together with Velcro. The U. S. military actually used it.

The inventions that impacts today’s children and youth are primarily electronic: Whether phones, computers, tablets, or smartwatches, they all have a type of screen. We are all impacted by screens from morning until night. Even in our churches, we rely on screens instead of hymn books. One way I taught my children to read was to follow the words with my finger as we sang the hymns in church. That doesn’t work with a screen.

Why not ask the children in your world what inventions have the most impact on their daily lives? As an adult, what impacts your life?