When Did Everything Become So … Disneyfied?

The Disneyfication of Childhood: from theme parks to youth sports, everything is optimized. / Illustration by Meredith Miotke

This past year, as part of my long, self-imposed quest to check off as many boxes on the list of “wholesome childhood experiences” for my kids as can be reasonably expected, I packed up my family and took two road trips to two different theme parks. Neither one was Disney World. There are, I figured, loads of thrills to be had on a much smaller, simpler (and, yes, cheaper) scale, and that’s what I was after. A little sliver of Americana for the kids. We’d find that, I hoped, at Hersheypark here in our home state, and at Dollywood in Tennessee.

Until this year, with the exception of a few scattered hours spent at Morey’s Piers or Gillian’s Wonderland (R.I.P.) at the Shore, the last time I had visited anything approaching an amusement park was in the 1990s, when everything was analog and comparatively unsophisticated. iPhones had yet to be invented; same, too, obviously, for the now-ubiquitous park apps designed to store tickets, to track wait times, to use as a guide. You couldn’t even buy tickets online back then; you had to actually talk to a human to gain access to the park. Once inside, you grabbed a printed map and carried it around with you all day.

In my hometown, Nashville, the big draw was the cheery, music-themed Opryland USA, which was larger and more vaudevillian than the Jersey boardwalk parks, but equally straightforward from a logistical standpoint: You roamed the park until some amusement drew you in, and then you waited in line, sometimes a very long one, before boarding. This was true no matter who you were: young, old, rich, poor, newbie, regular. If the line was too long, you left and came back later. Maybe you’d kill time by grabbing some sloppy theme-park nachos; maybe you’d catch a free show. Maybe you’d stand under a scorching sun in the splash zone of a water ride, waiting to get soaked by a log-shaped boat filled with screaming, sopping-wet passengers. A reliable, simple little thrill.

As you might guess, my recent trips both were and were not reflective of the rambling park experiences of my youth. On one hand, the rides themselves — fun, brain-rattling wooden coasters; raucous river floats; vertigo-inducing spinners — haven’t changed a lick. On the other, like virtually everything else in our world, the overall experience seems to be growing ever more sanitized and market savvy, more polished (you can order spinach-and-artichoke flatbread at a theme park?!), and more relentlessly tech-driven and geared toward “efficiency,” with things like touch-screen food ordering and digital maps available via QR code. One feels, tangibly, the effort to optimize both consumer experience and corporate profit. Especially profit. In short: They’ve gone and Disneyfied themselves.

Take, for one thing, the lines. My kids and I had been waiting for the Comet coaster at Hersheypark for maybe 20 minutes when I realized that I’d done it all wrong. While we were moving forward at a rate of .00005 inches a minute, some of our fellow park citizens were waltzing ahead in a shorter parallel queue. These people, I learned, had purchased Hershey’s equivalent of fast passes, an upgrade I’d heretofore associated only with the Disney stratosphere. There, the concept had always been framed to me as a given: If you’re going to spend $10K to ride rides in a 27,000-acre park that sees some 58 million people a year, why not spend a few more bucks to skip the tedium and spend more time on rides? Which, okay. But here? At sweet little ol’ Hershey? (For comparison’s sake: It’s 121 acres, and sees roughly 3.2 million guests annually.) The one-day park passes in our hotel package were $50 a person. An upgrade hadn’t even occurred to me.

Nor had it occurred to me to do any research at all before we went. Had I done so, I might’ve learned that you can get various iterations of “fast track” tickets for between $30 and $300. ($300!) But I did not, and so we did not. I felt like an out-of-touch idiot, but as we waited, my annoyance shifted from self-recrimination to self-defense (We’re here, and that’s enough!) to self-righteousness. “Is there anywhere left in this world where money doesn’t buy some people a better experience at the cost of others’?” I grumbled to my oblivious children. I worked myself into a lather over this (What a lesson for the kids!), and by the time we finally found ourselves whooshing around the track an hour and a half later, I was morally opposed to fast passes.

But newfound principles are the easiest to abandon, and a couple of months later, upon learning that Dollywood also offered multiple tiers of TimeSaver tickets, I caved and bought some for an extra $80 a person. And guess what? It did make for a better, more fulfilling day — though it had its own downsides: As dispiriting as it is to watch a passel of 12-year-olds bound ahead of you after an hour-long wait, paying to likewise cut a bunch of kids — including, in one of our lines, a group from the Boys and Girls Clubs of America — doesn’t exactly feel like a win either.

Please understand, I’m not trying to rag on either of these two parks, which are well-run and lovely. (Worth noting, too, that both were founded with altruistic intent by two of America’s most magnanimous philanthropists, Milton Hershey and the living saint Dolly Parton.) I want these destinations to continue to exist; I understand that endeavor involves adapting to evolving profit models and modern expectations. (Right? Can it possibly be a coincidence that Gillian’s — the wonderfully old-school throwback in Ocean City — went belly-up last year?)

What I’m saying is that these parks are part of a macrocosm; what I mean is that resisting the grinding gears of capitalism feels like trying to stop the ocean’s tide. At the very least, the tiered-ticket model for children’s activities seems to be the norm now. Even Sesame Place in Langhorne offers “Abby’s Magic Queue” privileges for $50, and if Opryland still existed, I’m sure it would have followed suit. Alas, it never had the chance. In 1997, two years before Disney rolled out its first fast-pass iteration, the company that owned the park decided to dispense with the rides and homespun-fun shtick and get right to the point, transforming Opryland into Opry Mills, a sprawling mega-mall known locally as Shopryland.

Americana 2.0, I guess.

Amusement parks, I grant you, do seem like the world’s most obvious target for Disneyfication — but they’re far from the only place you see it. Over the past 12 years of parenting, I’ve felt a sustained vibe shift — a slow but steady raising and polishing of every bar, often with a price attached — that affects many aspects of our kids’ lives. All our lives.

A colleague of mine brought this up just the other week in respect to orchards — a timely example, given the season. Trekking our kids out to pluck apples in the crisp autumn air has long been, for many parents, a semi-obligatory bucket-list outing that feels straightforward enough, if not downright idyllic. Organic, even. But, my co-worker bemoaned, many local orchards have themselves morphed into full-on theme parks, just with apples. He was gobsmacked last fall to arrive and find a parking lot that looked like the Linc on game day, plus lines everywhere, funnel cake vendors a go-go, and endless pay-to-play petting zoos and playgrounds and carnival-inspired activities that his children clamored for.

“It’s just not the most enjoyable experience,” he says. “The kids begging you for all the things they see, as opposed to the one thing you went to do.” Turns out, hey, the kids were in luck: When they finally made it to the orchard entrance, a sign announced that picking was closed for the season.

This jibes with many of my own orchard experiences in recent years, which have been maybe 25 percent joy of nature and 75 percent carnival-level chaos, expense, and meltdowns. Recently I googled “orchards, less commercial,” and found in the results one Redditor who articulated the issue perfectly: “Does anyone know of a spot that offers a more ‘old-fashioned’ experience for kids and families? I hate to sound like an old grump, but I don’t need to shoot a pumpkin cannon or ride a zip line this fall.”

I also hate to sound like an old grump (sigh, too late), but speaking of commercialization, have you heard where they’re going with kids sports? In July, the New York Times ran a piece about the burgeoning trend of private equity guys aiming to tap into the $40 billion fortune America pours into youth sports every year. Among them? Sixers owner Josh Harris, whose firm, Unrivaled Sports, has been buying up playing fields and baseball camps and various youth leagues “to assemble one of the largest collections of youth sports properties in the country.”

One focus of the piece was the risk that such profit-focused investors would raise the cost of playing sports, and thus potentially further stratify the haves and have-nots. Already, the paper noted, the average expenditure per family for a kid’s main sport in 2024 was $1,016 — 46 percent more than it was in 2019, and “a far cry from the days when youth sports were dominated by locally run offshoots of nonprofit organizations like the Catholic Youth Organization, Pop Warner and Little League Baseball.”

It’s a far cry in other major ways, too. Namely: What rec center in all of Philly (or all the world) could possibly compete with the “Ripken Experience” campus in Maryland? The complex, which Harris bought in 2023 and which hosts youth tournaments for 48 teams every season, features jaw-dropping fields that are replicas of major-league parks. Games are livestreamed to parents, who can also hit the food court as their little all-stars rotate among 15 batting cages and 16 bullpens.

Less homespun; more home runs.

And that’s a real bummer. Because even if you don’t buy into the for-profit model — not every kid will play in one of these spiffed-up tourneys or leagues, obviously — there’s a trickle-down effect, beyond the cost, that comes from such amped-up expectations. It changes the overall perception of what youth sports are and can be, what they should look like, who they’re for, and what their purpose is. Once, the point and the vibe was about playing, having fun, being happy. Now, as the Times story described, sports are also seen as an investment, as two in 10 parents of athletes think their progeny have a shot at Division I college sports, and one in 10 “thinks his or her child could reach the professional ranks or the Olympics.”

Hey, um, parents? According to a 2023 analysis from the NCAA, the chances of a high school baseball player getting to even Division III college ball were pegged at just 3.2 percent. That’s three out of 100 kids playing for the NCAA. The same report had just 5.1 percent of those NCAA players going pro.

But never mind the actual odds. There’s money to be made in the fathomless wellspring of optimism, hope, and love that parents have for their children. The market will always follow the money; and the parents, who want to give their kids all the great life experiences on offer, will eventually end up following the market. And so on, and so on. This explains, I think, how a culture that fetishizes the sandlot archetype in American lore and all it implies — from childhood freedom to the dubious allure of “simpler times” — is still rushing headlong into the exact opposite: the corporatized, sanitized, digitized, ultra-processed, fancified version of play and fun and happiness. Plus, maybe fame and fortune, if you’re to believe the pitch.

So good luck to us all! Sounds fun.

The upgraded, updated vision of youth sports has not yet trickled down to my own kid’s team, thank God. In fact, the sophisticated, tech-forward, Disneyfied world of private equity baseball stands in such stark contrast to the tiny, neighborhood-run league in which my son plays that I actually laughed out loud when I read the Times piece.

Our sports association is still gloriously, maddeningly Philly — less all-star, more Abbott Elementary. I’ve rolled my eyes for multiple seasons at umps who curse at parents and reverse calls with regularity, and at screaming matches between volunteer coaches, and at lackadaisical approaches to rules (and practices and field conditions and communications). But mostly, I feel grateful I don’t have to grapple with the sorts of things my friends in more moneyed suburbs talk about: high-pressure Little League drafts and championship rings for seven-year-olds and apps that include a livestream function for watching T-ball games. (For a fee, of course.)

Raising children is hard enough. If I can possibly help it, I don’t want more stuff to manage, more apps to download, more bells and whistles to pay for, or more responsibilities to juggle in the name of some optimized version of something that’s good enough as it is. And this is good. The kids have fun together, in their mostly matching uniforms, on their mostly fine fields. They even improve from season to season, playing their favorite game as the sun sets against the backdrop of the Philadelphia skyline.

A simple, reliable little thrill.

I hope my son sees it this way in his memories; I hope this teaches the lesson that I can’t really convey by railing against late-stage capitalism in the world’s longest roller coaster line. But the truth is, I can’t speak to what recollections or impressions either of my children will have of any of their childhood experiences, wholesome or otherwise. There’s a comforting illusion of control, I think, in the modern parental compulsion to offer and craft “core memories” — a phrase and concept popularized by the movie Inside Out from Disney’s Pixar, by the way. But it also produces anxiety in that it causes us to always question whether we’re offering enough in that vein. In a Disneyfied economy, the answer is: Well, you could probably still do more, make that experience even better.

But I don’t know that it gets better, memory-wise, than these baseball evenings, or the days we’ve spent climbing around the Wissahickon, where there are no funnel cakes or store-bought souvenirs to be had. Or the many, many hours we played at utterly tech-free Smith Memorial Playground, where kids zoom down an old, greased-up wooden slide on tattered, itchy coffee sacks. Or Sister Cities Park, where my barefoot toddlers once set toy boats afloat in a tiny wading pool, and screamed with joy in the water jets. All of those things are free, by the way.

One of our coolest new excursions this year — up there with, if not surpassing, the amusement parks — was to a place called Treehouse World, a rustic-feeling, modest adventure theme park built in and among hundreds of trees in West Chester. There are no rides. Instead, kids of all ages do zip lines and obstacle courses, jump on trampolines while attached to bungees, explore a series of intricately decorated treehouses. They climb webs made of rope and jump off planks of elevated wooden pirate ships with help from a staff that seems to consist largely of young teens — like Peter Pan’s Lost Boys. There’s no food court; a freezer full of ice cream bars does just fine. There are no fast passes; everyone just waits in line, together. I don’t see how it could get any more optimized

But who knows? The market and this world might yet find a way to somehow squeeze more out of, or in some way profit from, this wholesome, perfect experience, and others like it that are still out there, doing fine. If any future “improvement” involves a mega-mall — or a fast pass — I just hope I’m not around to see it.

Published as “It’s a Disney World After All” in the October 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.