What Koh Ker Taught Me About Lost Childhoods

I didn’t come to Cambodia expecting to reflect on childhood. I certainly didn’t expect to find answers at a remote temple complex deep in the forest. But that’s exactly what happened.

Visiting Koh Ker — once the seat of an empire, now a place of quiet beauty — I saw something that stopped me: children, barefoot and joyful, chasing a ball through the dirt. No screens. No supervision. Just freedom.

It reminded me of a life I thought we’d all left behind. And it got me thinking: what happened to the way we used to live? What did we lose when we handed our children the world… through a screen?

Koh Ker and the Return to Dirt

It started with a visit to Koh Ker. Not the temples, exactly — though they are magnificent in their quiet, overgrown dignity — but what was happening just beside them.

A group of children, barefoot and dust-covered, were chasing a homemade ball through the scrubby field next to the ancient seven-tiered pyramid. No adults. No helmets. No screens. Just dirt, laughter, and the kind of chaos that only kids can choreograph.

And I stood there, watching them, struck not just by the beauty of the moment — but by the recognition of it.

Because that used to be me. Not in Cambodia, of course. In England. On a patch of grass near a canal, with muddy knees and scraped elbows and no sense of time. Before the internet. Before smartphones. Before life became something you documented instead of lived.

These Cambodian kids weren’t re-enacting a lost tradition. They were just being. But for me, it felt like witnessing something sacred — the kind of childhood that’s vanishing in the West.

Koh Ker, once the capital of the Khmer Empire from 928 to 944 AD, is a place of forgotten grandeur. The temples lie scattered across the forest, quiet sentinels of another time. And right beside them: living history. Not in the stones, but in the children. In the way they moved. In the way they played.

It made me realise how much we’ve lost in our pursuit of progress — and how much still lives on here, in the dust and freedom of Cambodia’s everyday life.

That was the beginning. The crack in the wall. The moment that made me stop and think: what is childhood, really? And what have we done to it?

How We Started Optimising Our Children

Western childhoods today are no longer defined by dirt. They’re defined by design.

Structured playdates. Digital learning modules. Performance metrics. Educational toys that beep and flash and track. We tell ourselves it’s all to give them an advantage — to make them smarter, more successful, more prepared.

But somewhere along the way, childhood stopped being something to experience… and became something to manage.

Children now spend more time in front of screens than in physical play. They learn to swipe before they speak fluently. Many schools discourage risk-taking, spontaneity, or anything outside a narrow developmental rubric. Even toys have become smart. Measurable. Goal-oriented.

We’ve turned childhood into a product.

And in doing so, we’ve robbed it of its texture — the scraped knees, the missed curfews, the hours spent wandering fields with nothing to do.

Even joy is managed. Parents now worry if their child is “behind” in happiness.

We forgot that being alive is messy. And childhood should be too.

Digital Childhoods, Disconnected Lives

There’s a scene playing out across homes in the West every evening.

A child, maybe seven or eight years old, slouched on the sofa with a tablet balanced on their knees. Their eyes are locked on the screen, their fingers flicking and tapping with unconscious precision. Behind them, a television murmurs. In another room, a parent scrolls silently on their phone. No one is speaking. No one is misbehaving. It’s quiet. Controlled. Safe.

And eerily hollow.

We were told technology would connect us. That it would make children smarter, faster, more prepared for the future. But instead, it seems to have pulled them further away from being.

The modern Western child lives in a curated digital world. One that is sleek, responsive, and endlessly addictive — but largely solitary. They are swiping through simulated experiences, not living them. Learning from YouTube, not each other. And as a result, many are growing up without the social grit that comes from real-world interaction: negotiating playground politics, resolving fights, getting bored and learning how to move through it.

Instead, they’re being taught that every uncomfortable feeling has a swipeable solution. That silence is a failure. That boredom is a problem to be solved, not an invitation to create.

In Cambodia, the absence of technology tells a different story.

Children still play. They invent games. They use sticks as swords, rice sacks as sleds, rubber bands as ammunition. Their world is immediate. It’s not recorded. And in that immediacy is something we’ve lost.

Presence.

What the West Forgets

This country doesn’t rush you. It doesn’t push itself forward on a screen or a scoreboard.

Cambodia is still. Cambodia breathes.

Here, people smile without a reason. They sit without shame. They walk slowly. They notice things. They greet each other. They eat together. There’s a presence in daily life that I had lost.

And slowly, as the months passed, something began to shift.

At first, it was disorienting. But then, it started to feel like a kind of healing.

A gentle reprogramming. A softening. A remembering.

The Return to Wonder

There’s something strange that happens when you slow down in a place like Cambodia. You start to see things differently — not just around you, but within you. Your pace shifts. Your expectations soften. And, without realising it, you begin to peel back the layers of conditioning that shaped your understanding of what childhood, success, or even life itself is supposed to look like.

That’s what happened to me.

What started as a moment — watching kids play barefoot next to the temples — cracked something open. I didn’t just feel nostalgia. I felt disoriented. As if I’d been living on autopilot for years, believing the way things are in the West is the way things have to be everywhere.

But those kids weren’t performing for an audience. They weren’t worried about how they looked. They weren’t building their brand or preparing for something bigger. They were already in it — playing, laughing, present.

They reminded me of something I didn’t even know I’d forgotten.

Not just about children — but about being human.

Final Thoughts

In the West, we perform. In places like Cambodia, people still live.

That’s not a romantic generalisation — it’s an observation grounded in contrast. When you step outside the curated, structured, tech-driven experience of Western life, you start to see how much energy we put into control. How even our joy is micromanaged. How we’ve traded presence for productivity, wonder for efficiency, and imagination for algorithms.

We’re told our kids are “advanced” because they can use an iPad at two years old. But at what cost? Childhood isn’t a tech race. It’s a chance to learn how to live in the world. To get dirty. To be silly. To stumble, scrape, feel, and figure things out without a prompt.

In Cambodia, many children still grow up with that chance. And we should be learning from that, not racing to overwrite it.

This isn’t about turning back the clock. It’s about choosing what to carry forward.

Because wonder isn’t gone. It’s just buried.

And sometimes, all it takes to uncover it… is a barefoot kid and a temple in the forest.