America Has A Terrifying Infantilization Problem No One Is Talking About
A society with no consequences or risks is a sitting duck.
JackF | Canva Editor's Note: This is a part of YourTango's Opinion section where individual authors can provide varying perspectives for wide-ranging political, social, and personal commentary on issues.
Lately, I’ve been noticing something happen between my groups of friends. There’s a very stark divide between two main categories of my friends: those who chose to grow up, and those who haven’t.
I’m 36. I’ve lived on my own. I’ve started up my own businesses. My husband is 27 and has his own business, along with a 9 to 5 job.
When I’m not working, I’m fixing things around my new place or parenting. In other words, I’m an adult. I function as an adult. So does my husband. And while we’ve had to rely on family members due to circumstances out of our control before, we’re still doing the adult thing.
The same cannot be said for a sizable group of our friends. I’ve already written about Renata, the girl who just won’t grow up. She’s not the only one. I’ve also seen countless other men and women, all of whom have various stages of arrested development.
We have a terrifying infantilization problem no one is talking about.
Kids aren’t as mature as they were at my age. The more I talk to other parents, the more I realize something is wrong with Gen Alpha. Simply put, the milestones my friends and I reached aren’t being reached at that age anymore.
It first hit me during a conversation I had with my two friends who have two kids. I was taken aback when I heard that my friend’s kids are not allowed to use a microwave or stovetop at 10 years old. When I heard that, I looked at my friends and asked, “Why can’t they cook? They’re old enough.” My friends shrugged and said, “I just don’t think they’re ready yet.”
The cooking incident was far from the only one.
Kids these days are developing slower than any other generation before.
Even the earliest milestones are getting delayed, cooking and cleaning aside. Research from 2018 shows that parents are potty training their children later and later. Most children used to be fully toilet trained at 12 to 18 months old, but that age has swelled to three years old.
I remembered seeing a disclaimer at a kindergarten that said, “Students are required to be toilet trained.” I was shocked because a child who wasn’t toilet-trained in preschool was a rarity when I was a child. It’d get you bullied.
When I was younger, I was the one who was delayed. I wasn’t allowed to go out unsupervised until I was almost 15. The only exception would be my time at the mall — and that’s because it was indoors.
Today, some people are 18 years of age who still have curfews or are straight-up banned from going outside without a parent’s permission. That’s alarming. It goes beyond hover-parenting.
The delayed milestones are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
Does anyone else know people who always seem to be bailed out by their parents? Or adults who still don’t know how to do laundry or file taxes?
If you’ve been in the dating scene, you also probably hear 30-year-old men who insist that they are “too young to settle down,” as if their three decades is not enough time to figure out what they want. What’s funny is that most people who behave this way know they aren’t acting like the adults they have to be.
I’ve heard so many adults brush off their inability to be functioning adults with a giggle and an, “Oh, I can’t adult today, tee hee!” But it’s not a laughing matter. It’s scary.
America is breeding a country of mass arrested development.
Did you ever see those TikToks of Chinese kindergartens? They’re insane — and yet they were doing things I did as a kid. These TikToks show children as young as five learning foreign languages, cooking food, sewing, and playing war games.
In America, teachers pretty much beg kids that age to color in the lines. Nowadays, they also have to beg parents to potty train their kids so they don’t soil themselves.
It’s no secret that a scary number of American teens and young adults are lagging on social skills, reading, mathematics, and even the most basic life skills. A lot of the people who just graduated college will not be able to handle a typical workplace. That’s why I know so many people in their mid-to-late 30s who never moved out of their homes. They can’t hold a job.
When their parents die or move to a retirement home, these individuals will be completely, entirely, and utterly unprepared. And when this starts happening en masse, it will turn America’s culture upside-down.
What happened to cause the terrifying infantilization problem?
America’s culture is a perfect storm of factors that encourage and incentivize people to act like overgrown brats. Let me explain.
Scaredy parents
The biggest issue I see contributing to the infantilization of American teens is parenting.
Most American parents are terrified of everything. It’s a pathological level of fear. Sugar? Oh, can’t have that. Your kid’ll get diabetes and die. Sharp objects at a young age? Oh, no. They’ll stab themselves. Failing grades? Can’t have that. Little Timmy will feel bad.
People used to teach kids that fire was dangerous by letting them find out the hard way. It worked. You would only need to learn once to realize fire is hot. Today, parents are removing the proverbial fire and just carefully distracting the kid away from a drawing of flames. This makes it nearly impossible for kids to learn how to handle a fire once they see one.
In other words, parents are removing any risks their child may encounter — no matter how big or small. By removing risks, they keep their kids temporarily safe but also cripple those kids’ ability to learn life skills in time.
I’m a believer that if you give kids responsibilities, they will rise to the occasion. The same can be said of new employees. Tell them to do something, and you’ll be surprised at how quickly they’ll figure it out on their own.
Weaponized incompetence
If you go on Reddit, you’ll see a lot of teachers talking about how students pretend they are helpless by “losing pencils” or saying their pencil is broken to get out of an assignment. This is called weaponized incompetence — the act of pretending to be incapable of doing something solely for the ability to pass the buck to someone else. It doesn’t stop in the classroom.
Adults, most often men, pretend to be incompetent to avoid doing chores. Their wives and girlfriends end up doing those same chores despite the man often being just as capable. People who are put in caretaker positions, such as mothers, wives, or teachers, often bear the brunt of the workload. Our society still blames people in caretaker roles for others' refusal to work.
I’ve even seen this in workplaces. Of course, people who try to weaponize incompetence there tend to go fairly quickly … most of the time, anyway. What people don’t realize is that weaponized incompetence can backfire. If you keep acting helpless, any skills you do have could end up eroding over time. Most skills are a “use it or lose it” deal.
I’ve seen so many men in their 20s and 30s regress into teenage behaviors. The responsibilities that were a flex at 10 are now just annoying at 20, so they pass it onto their caretakers — be it their mom or girlfriends. Eventually, they start to regress and act like kids. Cue their shock when they get divorce papers.
No consequences
Actions have consequences. We’re in a society that seems to be increasingly unwilling to dole out consequences for those actions.
And then, we’re shocked that people act like little kids running amok. Real life doesn’t care if your feelings are hurt. Society doesn't care if you get pregnant from an assault or if you are going broke. It won’t. Our safety nets erode minute by minute, so you can’t count on them anymore.
If you end up with bad circumstances, even if they are not your fault, society will see it as “the consequences of your actions.” They will ask you why you didn’t do X, Y, and Z — as if there was always a way to prevent something from happening.
Sadly, this is partly because most people forget that things sometimes just happen and also because so many people just refuse to mature that we automatically assume people are “guilty until proven innocent.”
Giving people consequences they have to deal with is a major part of letting them grow up. And yet, we don’t ban bad customers who assault fast food workers from restaurants. We don’t expel students from schools. We don’t hold people accountable until we are forced to. Even the most patient people will have a breaking point with an immature person.
And more often than ever, we’re raising people to adulthood who have never experienced real, life-altering consequences.
When a person first experiences the consequences of their actions, it can be a huge shock to them. And because it’s such a rarity these days, they might not even learn that those consequences are supposed to be the norm, not the exception.
A society made exclusively of children is a broken society.
I’ll let you in on a secret: a society can’t function when 70% of its population acts like teenagers. That’s how crime happens. That’s how people end up not paying taxes. That’s how kids have kids they can’t take care of.
What truly scares me about our society is that we’re seeing people develop later and later, and we’re not sounding alarm bells. But we should. Because this will become a serious problem in about 10 years from now.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.