Adults are currently the "biggest driver of growth" in the toy industry. Here's why that's a bad thing.
And here's why that even needs to be explained.
“Adults are buying toys for themselves, and it’s the biggest source of growth for the industry.” This was a big bit of news this week, though perhaps the most notable thing here is that nobody outside of a few cranky conservative commentators seems to care all that much about this development. But this is a very weird trend—it’s extremely weird, and I think the only reason more people aren’t admitting this is that most people these are reluctant to criticize this sort of thing even if they recognize that it’s actually pretty suboptimal to have so many adults buying and playing with toys as if they were children.
Why, though, is this a bad thing? Why is it concerning that so many grownups are, as Today put it, using toys as “a stress reliever that reminds them of their carefree youth?” That the question even needs to be asked is itself a sign of the strange and inauspicious cultural moment we find ourselves in. If at any point prior to just a few years ago you’d asked the average person if this were a good thing—if you pulled someone off the street and said, “Do you think it would be good if grown adults started buying toys and playing with them all the time?”—nearly everyone would have said no. It was self-evident enough that most people probably couldn’t really explain it beyond the simplest terms: Toys are for children, not adults; an adult who plays with toys is acting like a child; that’s not good. You didn’t really need to expound upon it any more because the conclusions were pretty obvious.
We’ve moved beyond that these days. The general feeling about this sort of thing seems to run along, say, these lines: “What does it matter to you if an adult wants to play with toys in order to relax or have fun? That’s his business, not yours. Why are you being so judgmental?” The implication is that there’s simply no reason anyone should take any issue, at all, in any way, with personal decisions and habits and inclinations like these. We are called to be comprehensively unconcerned with anything anyone else does; we’re expected not merely to be “non-judgmental” but non-assessing, essentially offering no critical thoughts, opinions, beliefs or convictions about any aspect of anyone else’s personal lives, ever.
Here’s a blunt counter-suggestion: It’s not good for adults to be acting like kids. I think most of us sort of instinctually understand this but the cultural impulses of the moment mean most of us are reluctant to admit it, at least publicly, maybe even privately. As I’ve argued before, most people are extremely scared of being trashed on social media, and criticizing people’s superficial lifestyle choices is a very quick way to get yourself trashed on social media. So most people are unwilling to do it. Still, it seems pretty obvious to me that we all feel the same way about this: If an adult acts like a child, that’s not good, it’s sub-optimal, it should be discouraged.
But why? Why should you care? What’s so bad about it? That’s a fair question. Here are a few answers:
Human beings are ordered toward emotional and intellectual growth. We have evolved that way; our species is ordered toward shedding the simplistic trappings of childhood in favor of more important and pressing concerns. This has most assuredly taken many forms over our long and winding and laterally variant anthropological history, but in general there has always been a pretty clean dividing line between the relatively facile considerations of childhood and the more pressing and important considerations of adulthood. Among the most consistent indicators of childhood is toy play: Kids play with toys, they seek out toys and invest considerable time and energy in playing with them. They do this because the comparatively simple and unidimensional psyche of childhood is easily gratified by this kind of make-believe play. That’s find, it’s good; we should expect that of children. We should also expect that as human beings get older, their minds continue growing and expanding to the point that they require more concrete, real-world and meaningful stimulation than that which is provided by make-believe toy play—stuff that stimulates and develops the deeper and stronger and richer parts of their brains. We expect that adults are less likely to require childish toys in order to “relax” and that they are able to regulate their emotions and thoughts and feelings to the point that they find relaxation in a broader and more mature class of entertainment, i.e., books, movies, plays, productive hobbies, discussions with other adults. Thus when we see an entire generation of adults reverting to the kind of fantastical playtime that is usually reserved for childhood, it is instinctively unsettling. There’s been a regression of some kind. Something not good is going on here.
You could argue that this kind of stunted recreation is unconcerning insofar as it’s a purely personal matter that we shouldn’t worry about on a broader scale. I think this is very wrong. It is of vital cultural import when a society’s adults have regressed to childish forms of recreation, because adults who act like children in this one important way will almost certainly act like children in other, even more important ways. I don’t think anyone really doubts this, and I don’t think anyone doubts the negative repercussions likely to follow from that. If an adult surrenders to juvenile, childish impulses in his free time, I would think he is virtually guaranteed to do the same thing during, say, his professional time, and you’re not likely to have a productive, healthy economy if too many of your workers prefer to act like children rather than adults. Childish adults are also ill-equipped to raise healthy and fully-formed children in their own right. Picture the ideal father in your mind; is he one who in his spare time plays with Hot Wheels racetracks and Lego sets as a child does? Is your idealized mother one who still plays with Barbie dolls? Probably not. But why do you think that is? Because we recognize instinctively that children cannot effectively be raised by childish parents; something will go wrong; the wires will get crossed somehow. Childish adults raising children, nobody ever really growing up past their own childish impulses: The deleterious societal effects likely to follow from this arrangement seem self-evident.
That is, of course, if the adults in question even work toward having children at all, which is increasingly not a certain thing. Pew Research indicates that the share of Millennial women giving birth during their prime childbearing years has fallen sharply from that of their parents; elsewhere the service has found that the Millennial adults who haven’t yet have children are increasingly determined to never have them. This is not really all that surprising given the broad cultural incentives at play here: Adults are increasingly becoming more childish, nobody really seems interested in criticizing those choices, and indeed major corporations are deploying entire product lines to encourage that behavior. And of course we can probably expect this trend to exacerbate even more with the “Zoomer” generation and those to follow. The looming catastrophe and misery of a culture and a society and an economy in which people stop having children—I don’t think I have to explain just how bad that’s going to be, and in any event I guess at this point we’ll find out about it on our own.
I do not know if it’s possible to reverse this trend, at least before it’s too late to do anything meaningful about it. My instinct is to say no. But the overall takeaway here is: Don’t be afraid to be critical of stuff like this. We’ve sort of been bludgeoned into believing that it’s never okay to voice this kind of opprobrium. But is absolutely is, and in some cases it’s arguably incumbent upon us to do so, at least if we want to avoid the truly bad outcomes to which we seem to be hurtling. It’s never a guarantee that it’ll do any good, of course. But there’s no utility in shutting yourself up just because you’re afraid someone will be mad at you if you speak. That’s what a child would do.