Stuffed animals are often thought of as something for kids — a childish hobby that we should eventually give up, like imaginary friends and Capri-Sun. If the hobby continues beyond adolescence, it can be embarrassing. “Please, no one is going to psychoanalyze me for going to bed with a bunny every night at 30 years old,” actor Margot Robbie joked on “The Late Late Show With James Corden.”
However, this isn’t uncommon: surveys have found that around 40% of American adults sleep with a stuffed animal. And in the past few years, stuffed animals have become more popular among adults.
Erica Kanesaka, an Emory University professor who studies cute culture, told me in an email that it’s not just a matter of keeping childhood mementos into adulthood for sentimental reasons — adults are also buying stuffed toys for themselves simply because they like them.
The kidult market (defined by one market research firm as anyone over 12) is said to generate about 9 billion in toy sales annually. Among the most popular modern plush toy brands are Squishmallows and Jellycat, which specialize in nontraditional stuffed toys like cabbages and rainbow ostriches.
Generation Z has been at the forefront of embracing plush toys: 65% of Squishmallows buyers are between 18 and 24 years old.[2] Richard Gottlieb, a toy industry consultant, told NPR that “it went from being awkward… to what it is today, with Gen Z and millennials playing with them with pride.”
Of course, many people still find it weird or childish for adults to collect stuffed toys. When TikTok star Charli D’Amelio posted a photo of herself lounging with a small group of colorful Squishmallows, some commenters immediately began mocking her collection. D’Amelio was frustrated: “Everyone expects me to be an adult all the time,” she wrote (she was 16 at the time). “I’m still growing up.”
While the online dispute may seem innocuous, it points to an ongoing cultural negotiation over how much room adult life can leave for cuteness and playfulness, and whether adults need to “grow up.”
As a kid, I wasn’t too interested in stuffed animals; I saw them as helpless, candy-less piñatas. But in my early 20s, many of my friends began buying and giving stuffed animals to each other. One friend asked me whether Belly or Lulu would be a better name for a stuffed dragon. For my 21st birthday, someone gave me a stuffed pretzel toy of Jellycat. I keep it by my bed, and I know many of my peers are doing the same.
Some blame the growing popularity of stuffed animals on social media, where they are cute, nostalgic, and highly shareable. Kanesaka says the global popularity of Japan’s Hello Kitty and Pikachu also played a role.
Others blame younger generations for being too fragile, as one headline in Philadelphia Magazine put it, “Millennials! Put down your blankets and stuffed animals. Grow up!”[3] But the most common explanation seems to be that the stress, loneliness, and uncertainty of the early pandemic led adults to seek out the comfort of stuffed animals. “I took a stuffed polar bear from my childhood bedroom,” Sarah Gannett wrote in The New York Times, “to ward off the onslaught of bad news and fear.”
However, scholars such as Simon May, a philosopher at King’s College London, are not sure that the resurgence of adult stuffed animals is entirely related to the pandemic. May told me that stress and uncertainty were part of human life long before 2020. To him and other scholars who study cute animals, this resurgence is part of a larger shift that has been going on for centuries: the boundary between childhood and adulthood is disappearing.
Childhood is not always worth remembering. It is a period of life fraught with uncertainty: many children do not live to adulthood, dying from diseases that are now preventable. Some children worked in factories and coal mines from an early age.
“To take an example that is unimaginable now,” Joshua Paul Dale, a professor of cute cultural studies at Tokyo’s Chuo University, wrote in Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World, “it was not only common but acceptable for children to get drunk in pubs until the early 20th century.”
Dale argues that the concept of “childhood” was largely formed during the Enlightenment. Before then, children were mostly seen as little adults—even many medieval paintings of babies looked like tough, miniature versions of adults, with receding hairlines and all. Philosopher John Locke’s “Tabula rasa” helped to reframe children as blank slates with potential rather than half-baked adults.
By the 20th century, often called the “Century of the Child,” protections for children as a formative stage of life were well established. May even called the values that emerged at the time “child worship.” By 1918, every state in the U.S. had passed laws requiring children to attend school. In 1938, the U.S. placed strict limits on child labor. In 1959, the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child advocated for “special protection and care” for children. Parents could also expect their children to live longer: 46% of children born in 1800 did not survive to the age of 5, but by 1900, that number had been almost halved. In The Power of Cute, May writes that childhood has become “the new sacred place.”
Yet, Dale told me that in recent years, while childhood remains revered and protected, adulthood has often been associated with difficulty rather than freedom. A recent study found that adults aged 18 to 30 have the most negative views of adulthood,[4] perhaps because the delay of traditional “adult” milestones, such as marriage and childbirth, has led to a gap between expectations and reality. Dale also attributes the pessimism about adulthood to factors such as the gig economy and job insecurity: “It’s getting harder and harder to be an adult these days.”
As a result, the line between childhood and adulthood seems to have blurred in recent years. “Are we seeing, on the one hand, children acting more and more like adults?” May writes. In large part because of social media, children are often exposed to adult creators who share adult anxieties, leading to phenomena such as “Sephora tweens” using anti-aging skincare products. “On the other hand,” May continues, “adults are increasingly convinced that childhood is a determining factor in one’s entire life.”
So, children in childhood are becoming adults, and adults are becoming children.
For May, childhood seems to have become a mirror through which many adults examine their own emotional lives. “In each of us, there is a young, suffering child,” wrote Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh, and this concept of the “inner child,” first popularized by psychologist Carl Jung, has become a popular wellness concept.
The concept is sometimes sweet and sometimes borderline absurd: We often see posts like “Collecting dolls healed my inner child” and “I took a Caribbean cruise to heal my inner child.” On TikTok, a 2022 trend has users posting childhood photos with captions like, “When I’m mean to myself, I remember I wasn’t mean to them, either.”
Meanwhile, the emotional climax of Jennifer Lopez’s new film, This Is Me…Now, is the scene in which the adult Lopez bends over to hug her younger self and tell her, “I love you…I’m sorry.” If childhood is “the new sacred place,” as May puts it, then this emphasis on the “inner child” may be a way for adults to insist that they, too, are sacred—that the inner child deserves to be treated tenderly, even down to the stuffed animals.
Turning to cuteness could be a way to reject the rigid, overly serious nature of adult life, and acknowledge that both childhood and adulthood are constantly changing. “Embracing cuteness can also be a way to challenge traditional adult roles that have become anachronistic, outdated, and harmful,” Kanesaka writes. Being an adult means more than just sipping scotch and paying taxes. “Rather than accepting the idea that adulthood and power only come in one form (that we have to be strong and manly), stuffed animals can be a way to embrace a softer, gentler version of adulthood.”
It’s true that collecting stuffed animals isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but there are other ways to have moments of play and wonder in adult life, like bird watching and joining a Dungeons & Dragons league.
May believes that the shifting boundaries between childhood and adulthood are a natural part of the evolution of the human mind. Boundaries will break down, especially binary oppositions: “Where we see this most clearly right now is with gender.” While legal age boundaries may remain, childhood and adulthood may one day be seen as points on a continuum rather than distinct life stages. Ultimately, “the new way to be an adult will be one that incorporates these childlike elements,” Dale says. The resurgence of stuffed toys for adults may just be a precursor to something to come: Maybe one day we will all be adults who still have a childlike heart.
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