The Economist: Is Western culture stopping people from growing up?

An older boss was correcting a younger female employee. “There is no P in ‘hamster’,” said the boss.

But “that’s how I spell it,” the 20-something objected. The boss suggested they consult a dictionary. The employee called her mother, put her on speakerphone and tearfully insisted that she tell her boss not to be so mean.

It is an arresting vignette.

The tearful employee appears to have imbibed the notion of “my truth”, a popular phrase intended to rationalise the speaker’s beliefs and shield them from criticism based on facts.

You may say that 1+1=2, but “my truth” is that it makes three.

Post-modernists deem this way of thinking sophisticated. Keith Hayward calls it childish. He is right.

But Mr Hayward, a criminologist at the University of Copenhagen, goes much further.

In his book Infantilised, he contends that young people today are less mature than previous generations, and that Western culture is to blame.

He offers plenty of examples of “kidulting” to reinforce his case.

Some people like to recreate their childhood pleasures by dressing up as My Little Pony and buying tickets to places where they can jump into ball pits and do pillow-fights. Some carry on pursuing teenage kicks in nightclubs well into early middle age.

Over many years as a lecturer, Mr Hayward grew concerned that his 18-year-old students “resembled less mature teenagers on the cusp of adulthood and more fearful schoolchildren adrift in an alien world of adult autonomy”.

One arrived in class dressed in a onesie, noting that it was cold and he liked to feel comfortable.

Was he not “concerned about the infantilising overtones of such a garment?” asked Mr Hayward. “No, I want to be treated like a kid,” came the reply. “Adulting is hard.”

Here the author produces his most solid evidence, though it will be familiar to many readers.

In rich countries there has been a dramatic fall in the share of people who, by the age of 30, have attained the traditional markers of adulthood: leaving home, becoming financially independent, getting married, having a child.

In Britain, the median age for a first (heterosexual) marriage, at 33 for men and 31 for women, is a decade higher than it was in the early 1960s.

In 2016 a Pew study found that for the first time in 130 years, American 18-34-year-olds were more likely to be living with their parents than with a partner in a separate abode.

Pop culture, Mr Hayward believes, is infantilising people.

Modern cinema celebrates immaturity. From the unreconstructed man-children of School of Rock and Ted (which stars a beer-drinking teddy bear) to the endless Batman and Spider-Man remakes, “a visit to the movies these days feels more like a trip to a toy shop”.

Reality TV shows “normalise infantilism” by making “40-and 50-year old celebrities dress up as toy cars, children’s bears and dinosaurs”.

Many advertisements are an “assault on mature adulthood”.

The Milky Bar Kid has been portrayed by actors of all ages. Evian Water’s “live young” campaign featured adults in T-shirts that showed baby torsos beneath their necks.

The education system deserves some blame, too.

Students are shielded from potentially upsetting ideas: the University of Aberdeen in Scotland put a trigger warning on Peter Pan, saying that students might find the “odd perspectives on gender” in the book “emotionally challenging”.

Schoolchildren are told things that are manifestly untrue, such as “You can be anything you want to be.”

History, sociology and philosophy are compressed into a “childhood morality tale” of the “privileged” and the “oppressed”.

Schools and universities used to teach “the uncontroversial idea that (students) will need to adjust their behaviour and adapt to the world if they are to function effectively within it”. No more.

Finally, Mr Hayward chides the liberal commentariat.

On the one hand, they celebrated Greta Thunberg, a former schoolgirl activist, as an “all-knowing sage”, despite her possessing “no scientific expertise” and saying “nothing original whatsoever about climate issues”.

This, he claims, is evidence of “a role reversal in which young people are increasingly assigned the intellectual gravitas and cultural authority to educate adults”.

On the other hand, when Shamima Begum, a British schoolgirl roughly the same age as Ms Thunberg, went off to join the mass-murdering, mass-raping Islamic State, the same liberal pundits decried the British government’s decision not to allow her back into Britain to face justice, presenting her “as a duped child…far too young and naive to know her own mind, and therefore not responsible for her subsequent actions”.

“When society acts in such a hypocritical fashion, adultfiying on the one hand and infantilising on the other, it is playing a dangerous and duplicitous game,” thunders Mr Hayward.

Maybe so. But the main liberal argument for allowing Ms Begum to return home is that it is against international law to make someone stateless.

If it were not, countries could dump all their criminals on foreign shores and refuse to take them back. Mr Hayward does not mention this.

There are some nuggets in this book.

This reviewer was intrigued to learn that, according to the “fabulously named” Immorality Lab at the University of British Columbia, those who regularly signal victimhood are more prone to lying and cheating for selfish ends, a habit people are supposed to grow out of.

And it can’t hurt to remind American voters of Donald Trump’s reported schoolyard hissy-fit when his vice-president refused to help him try to overturn the results of the election he lost in 2020: “I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this!”

But Mr Hayward’s argument has two flaws. One is that it is so grumpy.

Why shouldn’t adults dress up as comic-book characters, if they enjoy it? What is wrong with liking the Wallace and Gromit animated films? Being grown-up means taking responsibility for your actions; it does not mean only ever seeking fun in highbrow places.

The second, bigger flaw is that Mr Hayward glosses over more compelling explanations for the supposed surge of “infantilism” he decries.

Perhaps there is more memorable evidence of adults behaving childishly these days because everyone has a camera and posts amusing clips to social media.

The idiotic things that the Boomers and Generation X did in their 20s are nearly all forgotten, thank heaven. The silliest antics of the silliest members of Gen Z tend to go viral.

And perhaps the reason why young people are finding jobs and having children later in life than earlier generations is that they are remaining longer in education.

A whopping 40 per cent of Americans aged 25 and over now have college degrees, up from 8 per cent in 1960.

This is a huge change, and usually considered a good thing, even if some degrees are costly and pointless.

Those who are still studying at 25 are unlikely to be financially independent, and may therefore hesitate to have children. This is not childish; it is wise.

Other writers, such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, have compiled interesting and sometimes troubling research about the young, from their apparently high levels of mental anguish to their threadbare support for free speech. But to dismiss a whole generation as big babies seems like name-calling.

Infantilised. By Keith Hayward. Constable; 432 pages; £25 (AUD$48)