“We have evolved, it seems, into a generation of Peter Pans, perpetually stuck in adolescence. You see them in Hyde Park: thirty and fortysomethings on rollerblades and skateboards, hanging out in Glastonbury or discussing the merits of Oasis vs Blur at dinner parties”
Quote: Dave Green, The Guardian, 25 November 1995.
Photograph: Lakeland Motor Museum collection.
“Are grown-ups refusing to grow up?” This was a question that was asked almost as often as “is childhood disappearing” in the 1980s and 1990s. According to many, the answer was yes, adults refused to mature, while children grew up too fast. This point was evidenced by pointing at examples of adults crossing the habitual boundaries of childhood and using devices attributed to childish pastime activities.
“Six-year-olds now watch movies in which James Bond is seen in bed with a luscious blonde, while 60-year-olds wear jeans and play Star Wars video games. Outside the school gates in fashionable London neighbourhoods, fathers can be seen waiting to fetch their children – wearing skates and listening to pop music through headphones. The mothers sport punk rock hair-dos and wear electric blue playsuits. As we allow children to become older, by putting girls aged 16 and under, on the Pill – so we struggle, as adults, to be younger, by dressing youthfully, using cosmetic surgery, and refusing to take on adult responsibilities. The consequences are disastrous.” wrote Mary Kenny for the Daily Mail.
These disastrous consequences, according to many commentators, included the breaking down of the hierarchical distinctions between childhood and adulthood. Once that hierarchy was broken, adults would lose their authority over children, and children would lose the pivotal notion of adulthood to differentiate themselves from. According to Peter Beaumont, “The youth culture created by the Baby Boomers devalued the authority figure so it became something boring. Within that construction, young males who want to rebel have nothing to rebel against. You end up with a pointless rebellion that leads to infantilism. The kind of rebellion we are seeing is not sullen, sultry, and interesting. It is silly, childish, and uninteresting.”
A particular concern was playfulness, which implied immaturity, and this concern was embodied in the grown-up that used items such as “Walkman”s, “Gameboy”s, and roller skates. Nick Hornby, the author of About A Boy, the quintessential 1990s novel which dealt with the theme of prolonged adolescence, teasingly wrote: “‘You’ll be going to classical concerts by the time you’re 25, I guarantee you,’ my dad used to say, but it never happened, even though I was looking forward to knowing something about wine (…) This is not, however, an era that encourages us to grow old gracefully. Too many people are out running marathons when they should at home watching Play Your Cards Right, and too many people are wearing Levi’s when they should be listening to the Jimmy Young show.”
In this sense, adulthood was expected to be a sombre, dignified life stage, and adults were expected to occupy themselves with highbrow activities, whereas playfulness was reserved for children. Some commentators, like Dave Green writing for The Guardian, interpreted “infantalisation” as a reflection of the changing times, which valued speed and agility more than it valued experience and maturation: “infantalisation simply resembles a form of social neoteny, where the playful experimentation, lifestyle flexibility, and faster learning of childhood has been carried forward into early adulthood, in order to cope with the more rapid, intense pace of modern life.”
Quoted news:
Mary Kenny. “The slaying of childhood.” Daily Mail, 18 March 1983.
Peter Beaumont. “Thirtysomethings who won’t grow up.” The Observer, 19 May 1996.
Nick Hornby. “Hope I’ll grow up before I get old.” Independent on Sunday, 17 April 1994.
Dave Green. “Just kidding.” The Guardian, 25 November 1995.
More on social meanings of age, generations, and adulthood:
Jane Pilcher, John Williams and Christopher Pole. “Rethinking Adulthood: Families, Transitions, and Social Change,” in Sociological Research Online 8(4), 2003.
Harry Blatterer, “Contemporary Adulthood: Reconceptualizing an Uncontested Category,” in Current Sociology 55(6), 2007.
Jane Pilcher. Age and Generation in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
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