Parenting & Family Quote by Robert Redford

Redford’s line lands like a quiet flex: not nostalgia for a lost America so much as a claim to having been formed outside the soft glow of a mass audience. Coming from an actor, it’s pointed. He made his career in the very machinery television helped build, yet he’s drawing a boundary between his inner life and the medium that standardized everyone else’s.

The intent is generational, but the subtext is about control. Television isn’t just a device here; it’s a habit of attention, a default setting for how people absorb reality. By saying he didn’t grow up with it, Redford implies a different kind of upbringing: more unmediated boredom, more local culture, more time spent watching actual people instead of performed versions of them. That background becomes a credential, suggesting a steadier self not constantly trained by edits, ads, and laugh tracks.

Context matters: Redford is the actor-director who built Sundance into a counterweight to mainstream entertainment. This quote fits that lifelong posture of wary participation. He’s not anti-screen so much as suspicious of what screens do when they become the environment rather than the occasional window. There’s also a subtle parental anxiety tucked in: his children (and “people today”) inherit a world where taste, politics, and identity are prepackaged and piped into the home.

It works because it’s understated. No moral panic, no technophobia - just a simple timeline that smuggles in an argument about autonomy, perception, and what it means to grow up before the audience moved into the living room.