Welcome to Kidulthood

Stuffed animals have often been deemed one of the quirky conventions of childhood—an infantile love we should eventually let go of, along with imaginary friends and Capri-Suns. If that love lasts past adolescence, it can be seen as embarrassing. “Please,” the actor Margot Robbie joked on The Late Late Show With James Corden, “no one psychoanalyze the fact that I’m 30 and I sleep with a bunny rabbit every night.”

Yet that isn’t really such an unusual thing to do: Surveys have found that four in 10 American adults sleep with stuffed animals. And it seems that over the past few years especially, plushies and toys have become more popular with adults, Erica Kanesaka, a professor at Emory University who studies cuteness, told me in an email. This isn’t just a matter of childhood keepsakes tagging along into adulthood for sentimental reasons—adults are also buying plushies for themselves, simply because they like them. The “kidult” market—which one market-research company generously defines as anyone over age 12—is said to account for about $9 billion in toy sales every year. Among the most popular modern stuffed-animal brands are Squishmallows and Jellycat, which specialize in unconventional plushies such as bok choy and rainbow ostriches. Gen Z is leading the way in embracing stuffed animals: Of Squishmallows buyers, 65 percent are ages 18 to 24. “It went from being an embarrassment … to today, when Gen Z and Millennials proudly play,” the toy-industry consultant Richard Gottlieb told NPR.

Of course, plenty of people still find it odd or juvenile for adults to collect stuffed animals. When the TikTok influencer Charli D’Amelio posted a photo of herself lounging with a small army of colorful Squishmallows, some commenters were quick to deride her collection. D’Amelio responded with frustration: “Everyone expects me to be this adult all the time,” she wrote (she was 16 at the time). “I’m still growing up.” Although this internet dustup might seem frivolous, it points to an ongoing cultural negotiation around how much room adulthood can make for cuteness and play—and when, if ever, adults just need to “grow up.”

I, for one, am not immune to the adult stuffed-animal revival. As a child, I wasn’t super interested in plushies; I saw them as hapless, candyless piñatas. But in my early 20s, many of my friends started buying and gifting stuffed animals. One friend consulted me on whether the name Belly or Lulu would better suit a stuffed dragon. On my 21st birthday, someone gave me my own Jellycat stuffed pretzel. I placed it on my bed with no shame, knowing that many of my peers were doing the same.

[Read: Why people pretend to talk as their pets]

Some have attributed plushies’ rising popularity to social media, where the combination of cuteness and nostalgia lends itself well to shareability. The global popularity of Japanese kawaii characters such as Hello Kitty and Pikachu has also played a role, Kanesaka said. Others blame the fragility of younger generations; as one Philadelphia-magazine headline put it, “Millennials! Get Over Your Blankies and Stuffed Animals and Grow Up Already!” But the most popular explanation seems to be that the early pandemic, with its stress, isolation, and uncertainty, led adults to reach for the soothing comforts of plushies. “I grabbed a polar bear from my childhood bedroom,” Sarah Gannett wrote in The New York Times, “to ward off the onslaught of bad news and fear.”

Yet scholars such as Simon May, a philosopher at King’s College London, aren’t so sure that the adult stuffed-animal revival is solely pandemic-related. Stress and uncertainty were a part of human life long before 2020, May told me. For him and other cute-studies scholars, this revival is part of a larger shift that’s centuries in the making: the dissolution of the boundary between childhood and adulthood.

Childhood wasn’t always something to be nostalgic about. It was a life stage marked by precarity: Many children didn’t survive into adulthood, killed by now-preventable diseases. Others worked in factories and coal mines from an early age. “To take one example that is hard to imagine now,” Joshua Paul Dale, a cute-studies professor at Chuo University, in Tokyo, wrote in Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World, “children drinking in taverns to the point of inebriation [was] not only common but also accepted, right up until the turn of the twentieth century.”

According to Dale, the concept of “childhood” took shape largely during the Enlightenment. Before that, kids were mostly seen as small adults—even the babies in many medieval paintings resemble stoic, shrunken grown-ups, receding hairlines and all. It was the philosopher John Locke’s idea of tabula rasa that helped in part to rebrand kids as blank slates of potential as opposed to half-baked adults.

By the 1900s—often called the Century of the Child—the protection of childhood as a formative life stage was well on its way. May goes so far as to call the values that emerged then “the cult of child.” By 1918, every U.S. state had passed a law requiring children to attend school. In 1938, the U.S. placed strict limitations on child labor. In 1959, the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of the Child championed children having “special safeguards and care.” Parents could also expect their kids to live longer: Whereas 46 percent of children born in 1800 did not live to their 5th birthday, by 1900, that figure had been nearly halved. In The Power of Cute, May writes that childhood became “the new locus of the sacred.”

Yet in recent years, even as childhood remains exalted and protected, adulthood has become associated more with difficulty and less with freedom, Dale told me. One recent study found that adults ages 18 to 30 have the most negative views of adulthood, possibly because the delay of traditional “adult” milestones such as marriage and parenthood has generated a disparity between the expectations and reality of adulthood. Dale also attributes adulthood’s gloomier reputation to factors such as the gig economy and the precarity of work: “It’s harder to be an adult these days.”

As a result, it seems that, lately, the line between childhood and adulthood is blurring. “Are we not seeing, on the one hand, children behaving in ever more adult ways?” May writes. Thanks in large part to social media, children are regularly exposed to adult creators with adult concerns, leading to phenomena such as Sephora tweens with antiaging skin-care routines. “And, on the other hand,” May continues, “adults [are] becoming ever more vividly governed by a conviction that childhood is the ongoing determinant of a whole life.”

[Read: Why grown-ups keep talking like little kids]

So while childhood is being adultified, adulthood is being childified. For May, childhood seems to have become the lens through which many adults view their emotional life. “In each of us, there is a young, suffering child,” the Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh wrote—and this concept of an “inner child,” first popularized by the psychologist Carl Jung, has now become a popular wellness idea. The concept manifests in ways that are sometimes sweet and sometimes borderline ridiculous: It’s not uncommon to come across articles such as “Healing My Inner Child Through Doll Collecting” and “I Went on JoJo Siwa’s Caribbean Cruise to Heal My Inner Child.” On TikTok, a 2022 trend featured users posting childhood photos with the words “when I’m being mean to myself I remember that I’m being mean to them.” Meanwhile, in Jennifer Lopez’s new movie, This Is Me … Now, the emotional climax is a scene in which a grown-up Lopez bends down to hug her younger self, telling her, “I love you … I’m sorry.” If childhood is “the new locus of the sacred,” as May suggests, then this emphasis on the inner child might be a way for adults to insist that they, too, are sacred—that the child within them deserves gentleness and safekeeping, and maybe stuffed animals.

Turning toward cute objects might be a way to reject a sterile, self-serious version of adulthood, and acknowledge that both childhood and adulthood are ever-shifting categories. “Embracing cuteness can also be a way of challenging traditional adult roles that have come to feel incorrect, outdated, and damaging,” Kanesaka wrote. Being a grown-up can encompass more than just doing taxes while downing scotch. “Rather than accept the idea that adulthood and power only look one way—that we must be hard and masculine,” stuffed animals can help people embrace a “softer and gentler” kind of adulthood, Kanesaka wrote to me. Sure, collecting stuffies isn’t everyone’s thing, but there are other ways—bird-watching, joining a Dungeons & Dragons league—for people to infuse adulthood with moments of play and wonder.

May sees this shifting boundary between childhood and adulthood as part of the natural progression of human thought. Categories collapse, he told me, especially binaries: “We see it most obviously right now with gender.” Though presumably legal-age cutoffs will remain, childhood and adulthood could one day be seen more as points on a continuum rather than as distinct life stages. Perhaps eventually, “the new kind of way of being an adult will be to incorporate these playful, childlike things,” Dale said. The adult stuffed-animal revival might only be a drumroll signaling what’s to come: Maybe we’ll all be kidults one day.