Nowadays adults collect My Little Pony dolls and play with Legos. They read Harry Potter and comic books. They go on sleepovers at museums and down Gummi Bear vitamins.
It’s called adult infantilization, adults maintaining
hobbies and interests that are created specifically for children and which are
relatively uncomplicated and unsophisticated compared to adult experiences.
I’ve written about the negative impact of infantilization a
number of times, including most recently on June 30, 2016,
October 27, 2014 and May 10, 2014. My concern with infantilization is
that I believe it leaves adults not just acting like children, but thinking
like them.
Bad for society, but good for advertisers. Advertisers want
adults to behave like children because it makes them better consumers. Children
are more self-centered and find it harder to think long-term, so they are more
likely to make an impulse purchase for themselves. Children have less
sophisticated thought processes and are therefore easier to convince to buy or
believe something. Children have not had rigorous training in economics, the
scientific method and logic and tend to engage in magical thinking. Children
tend to believe anything an authority figures says.
We can see the trend of increased adult infantilization in the pandemic
of popular movies focused on adults who behave like children over the past 20
years. A partial list: The “Harold & Kumar” movies, “Old
School,” “Big,” “Grandma’s Boy,” the “Ted” flicks, “The
Wedding Crashers,” “Billy Madison,” ”Step Brothers,” “You, Me
and Dupree,” “Dodgeball,” “The 40-year-old Virgin,” “Knocked
Up,” all three “Hangovers,” the “Jackass” movies,
“Bridesmaids,” “Hall Pass” and “Identity Thief.”
It’s easy to see why someone selling products and services—especially
unneeded junk—might want to deal with children and not adults, or to be more
precise, to deal with adults with the thought processes of children. But
children make poor citizens and worse voters, as they are more easily swayed by
fallacious thinking and more likely to see things in terms of good and bad, us
and them, thereby missing nuances that are particularly important in a
pluralistic society.
In reading Beyond Words by
science popularizer Carl Safina, I’ve discovered that infantilization may be a
byproduct of the evolution that humans have gone through since forming
sedentary societies. In discussing the domestication of wolves into dogs and a
decades-long experiment to domesticate foxes by letting only the less
aggressive ones breed, Safina lists a set of physical traits that seem always
to be tied to friendliness or a lack of aggression, the traits that humans
prefer in dogs: droopy ears, splotchy or mottled coats, wagging tails, shorter
legs, shorter faces with smaller teeth. As it turns out, all these physical
characteristics are present in the young of the species, who then grow out of
them. As for behavior, to quote Safina,
“As adults, the friendly foxes continue to behave like juvenile wolves, acting
submissively, whining and giving higher pitched barks.” He and the research he
references postulate that “genes resulting in invisible brain changes for
friendly behavior also result in highly visible changes in how foxes look.”
Safina points out that these changes are virtually the same ones that occurred in
wolves as they became dogs. Safina concludes that researchers and farmers who
have thought they were selecting for nonaggressive personalities were also
selecting for juvenile versions of adults, “perpetual pups” as he writes.
Later in Beyond Words, Safina
points out that the extremely social and peaceful bonobos have many physical
traits that the highly aggressive and anti-social chimpanzee have as children
but lose as adults, including skull shape, flatness of face, smaller teeth and
the existence of the labia majora in females. Surprise, surprise, humans share
these bonobo traits that adult chimpanzees lose.
Anthropologist Chris Boehm has postulated that over time,
groups of humans may have eliminated many of those most prone to aggressive
acts, such as rape, murder, cheat and other anti-social behavior because
imprisonment, execution, death in war and banishment all impede procreation. What
we’re talking about is not any millennium-long program of eugenics, but the
adaptive superiority of civilized behavior once humans formed large groups.
While blackguards still exist, the theory goes that there are fewer of them
because of conscious selections by human beings.
Could it be that the more domesticated humans that populate
advanced societies are also more prone to keeping their juvenile predilections?
That the less aggressive a population is, the more likely that many of its
members will not only maintain the traits of adolescence or childhood, but the
mindset as well?
It’s depressing to think that we may be hardwired as a social
species to have an overall decline in our ability to think clearly, which is
what a wholesale reversion to juvenile thought process would entail. It could
lead to more of the short-sighted selfishness that has led to policies that are
boiling the oceans, overstuffing the atmosphere and water with carbon dioxide,
destroying massive numbers of species and threatening the continued existence
of humanity.
Let’s face it; everything we know about the natural history
of the world and the physics behind its playing out over time is that the goal
of evolution is the destruction of species. According to current evolutionary
science, virtually all species that have existed have gone extinct. As levels
of carbon monoxide and oxygen have varied through the ages so have the conditions
of life, favoring some creatures for a while and then others. Moments of
extreme change have produced five mass extinctions and it looks as if we are in
the middle of a sixth one, caused primarily by humans. Thus, human
self-domestication, which carries so many advantages for humans in society, may
also have disadvantages which over time could lead to our demise.
The answer, however, is not to become more aggressive as a
species again. Our future depends on greater cooperation, not less, on more peaceful
resolution of conflicts, not on warfare.
What we need is an education system that trains children to
be free-thinking adults and not good consumers. One example: when I was growing
up, there was no such thing as young adult fiction, which is now the hottest
fiction category. Children went right from the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew to
adult fiction, which could sometimes be sloppy romantic novels, but could also
be works of great literature such as most of Mark Twain, some Steinbeck, Gulliver’s Travels, Catcher in the Rye, the books of Sinclair Lewis, A Tale of Two Cities. The list of books
with adult complications and psychologies that are appropriate for teenagers
goes on and on. Young adult fiction such as the Harry Potter series should not
be taught in schools, nor qualify as reading assignments. We should analyze all
high school curricula for signs of unconscious infantilization, e.g., talking
down and simplifying subjects as if teens were still children or using
methodologies meant for elementary school students with high school students.
We should also flush the system of the accretion of consumerism that has built
up through the years, such as classroom material sponsored by corporations that
sell to the public. I also believe that there are certain inherently
infantilizing experiences which we should limit (not prohibit) to all children,
such as video games, comic books and branded toys. A stuffed dog will help a
child mature more than a stuffed animal from a movie. A child makes up her-his
own fantasies about a generic Ruff or Ralph. A branded toy has already created
the narrative for the child. The branded toy also teaches children to accept
the authority of a brand as a value in and of itself instead of evaluating
things on their own merit.
I’m also wondering if helicopter parenting is also leading to infantilization. Adults have gotten their fingers
into a lot of children’s activities. We should give children of all ages enough
free time to play in unorganized settings, free of adult supervision. When all
activities are constantly monitored and organized by adults, children are more
likely to stay in their role as children. When a child is used to parents’ too
active involvement in meeting challenges such as negotiating high school and
applying to college, the child may continue to think like a child.