Why Are There More and More “Overgrown Babies” in Our Era? | QDaily Research Lab

Growing up now has little to do with age. A lasting “juvenility” means more than immaturity — it also means being unreasonable and refusing to take responsibility.

These days you see it everywhere: hogging a priority seat on the subway that was never meant for you; years out of college, not studying, not job-hunting, living off your parents at home; forgetting your ID, missing your train, and expecting a whole carriage to wait for you; falling out with an airline on a trip abroad and, instead of working through the rules, shouting for the embassy to step in. This whole run of “I want it” and “I want it now” goes by one name: the “overgrown baby.”

The behavior has always been around, and has always drawn complaints, but search data shows that interest in the term spiked in late 2016: the average Baidu Index for “overgrown baby” rose from 220 between January 2011 and November 2016 to 745 between December 2016 and February 2018.

The term explains itself: an adult’s age and an adult’s body, with a mind still parked in infancy — a juvenile state that never ends, or “neoteny.”

In 2000, the psychologist Jeffrey Arnett coined “emerging adulthood” for young people who stay in adolescence and put adulthood off. Eighteen may be the legal age of adulthood, but growing from a teenager into a grown-up is not that simple, and plenty of people in their twenties still don’t feel like adults. Survey data bears this out. Judged by something as crude as who you live with, a Pew Research Center survey found that in 2016, 32.1% of young Americans lived with their parents, more than lived alone, with a partner, or in any other arrangement. That had never happened before in modern American society, and the same trend holds worldwide.

Because of this, Arnett argued, young people today need psychological and policy support as they cross from adolescence into adulthood. Some American policy already allows for it: “kids who are still growing up” can stay on their parents’ health insurance until 26, and while you can hold a driver’s license at 18, you can’t rent a car until 25.

If all this meant was a longer adolescence — a few extra years of transition before adulthood — it would be simple enough. But the “overgrown baby phenomenon” we are talking about causes more trouble than that.

We summed up what an adult should look like in an earlier article: in QDaily Research Lab’s survey, the first thing people now use to judge whether someone has grown up is not marriage or starting a family but “financial and practical independence, obviously, but emotional independence too.” In real life, many people are long past the “twenty-something” transition and still hold on to their juvenility. For them, growing up has stopped having anything to do with age.

As for the other forms today’s overgrown babies take, we drew on QDaily Research Lab’s surveys on the workplace, attitudes toward time, anti-discrimination, and handout seekers to sort them into these types:

1. The Workplace Teammate With No Sense of Responsibility

Thinks “I don’t want the job I have, but I don’t know what I’m suited for either” — and the result of that fog is that they can’t do the job they have, so someone else is always cleaning up after them;

Complains about work all day, with “I’m done here” and “I’m quitting after New Year” always on their lips — long on talk, short on action, leaving nothing behind but grievances;

Third-rate at the work, first-rate at passing the buck: the moment something goes wrong, the professional shifting of blame begins;

Never starts a conversation; by the time they do, the damage usually can’t be undone;

Moves three times faster when quitting than they ever did on the job, and once the handover is left half-finished, they can never be reached again.

2. People With No Sense of Time

Treat delay as normal, to the point that anyone planning with them has to build their delays into the schedule;

Promise things they have no time to do, then tell you at the last possible moment that they can’t finish;

Have no accurate sense of time at all: half an hour late to a meeting, saying “almost there” and “nearly done” every three minutes.

3. The Belligerent Anti-Discrimination and Rights-Defense Crowd

You’re not allowed to dislike a gay person you know: criticize one individual and you’re discriminating against the whole LGBT community;

“I object to Americans discriminating against us! So I’m going to preach Chinese people’s own brand of individual heroism!”;

Band together and slap on labels: if your service is bad, you must be picking on us, the XX people;

Take on a job that isn’t theirs — fans attacking a celebrity’s management team for the star: “my idol’s career is going nowhere at this rate.”

4. The Handout Seekers, Who Are Everywhere

Bother other people for answers to common questions they could Baidu themselves;

Never search for anything when they join an online discussion, just beg for links in the comments;

Never pay a cent, but constantly hound fansub groups for videos, and get angry if a release is skipped or late;

Ignore copyright and beg for watermark-free originals in the comments under a manga artist’s Weibo;

Toss off questions to older schoolmates — “what do I need to prepare for the grad school exams?” — that would take a book to answer;

Build friendships on “isn’t this easy for you? why won’t you just do it for me.”

This kind of juvenility means more than immaturity; it also means being unreasonable and refusing to take responsibility. There is a name for these people: the “snowflake generation,” for their thin skin and low tolerance for hardship. In May 2013, Time ran a cover story on millennials, “The Me Me Me Generation.” The author argued there was no shortage of evidence for calling this young generation lazy, selfish, and shallow. Compared with the generation before them, surveys showed, they cared more about claiming their rights at work — 40% believed they should be promoted every two years regardless of performance — while the share willing to take on responsibility at work fell. The article tied this to narcissistic personality disorder, citing a National Institutes of Health survey that found people in their twenties were three times as likely to be diagnosed with the disorder as people over 65. In 2009, 58% of college students scored higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory than students did in 1982.

As with many social questions, once a claim like that is made, others come forward to say it is too absolute. An article in The Atlantic argued that narcissistic tendencies have little to do with which generation you belong to and are simply what everyone goes through at that age. A recent BBC report said social forces really are making people more self-focused, but that this may mean they are growing more confident, not necessarily that they suffer from the negative trait of narcissism.

Without settling the question of whether self-centered overgrown babies are in fact multiplying among the young, we looked at the wider debate and at QDaily Research Lab’s own surveys, and found that the “overgrown baby phenomenon” generally has these causes:

1. Society Has Stretched Out the Time It Takes to Become an Adult

Why was adulthood traditionally set at 18, when people in their twenties now still feel they haven’t grown up? Analyses of why young Americans are less willing to leave home point to causes in the structure of society: longer lives and more schooling mean young people leave education later and marry later; slow economic growth has pushed down employment in this group and made well-paid jobs harder to find. In short, the odds of becoming financially independent have fallen. Thanks to globalization and urbanization, none of this belongs to one country or one class anymore.

Then there is the change in family structure noted in a study we wrote about earlier. In a society with fewer children, people get more care from their families, and there seems to be no great hurry to grow up.

2. “Be Yourself,” Gone Off Course

Time once cited the argument that the Industrial Revolution let people choose their work and their way of living more freely and flexibly, and that the information revolution has made it possible for an individual to stand against a company (entrepreneurs against established firms, KOLs against traditional media, and so on). In everyday talk and in mass media, the halo around the personal power of successful people is placed front and center and reinforced, and people have grown more inclined to think and act with themselves at the center.

But in QDaily Research Lab’s survey, we found that not everyone has a sound grasp of “freedom” or “the self.” With little serious discussion of the subject in daily life, the pursuit of freedom can go off course like this — and the behavior such ideas produce is easy to picture:

• Not grasping where freedom ends: treating free speech as the freedom to curse out anyone on social media;
• Simplifying freedom: taking contrarianism and opposition for its own sake to be freedom;
• Abusing freedom in the service of selfishness: calling pirated downloads a form of sharing freely, because “good things should reach more people”;
• Getting the basic concept wrong: if you question the state or patriotism, “you don’t deserve free speech”;
• Having no principles at all: confusing plagiarism with homage or borrowing, and pedophilia with the freedom to love;
• Applying one rigid standard: setting responsibility against freedom, as if someone still tied down by a job doesn’t deserve freedom of the soul.

3. “You’re the Best” Parenting and “Just Pass the Test” Schooling

Some analyses trace young people’s growing self-absorption to the encouragement-based parenting that caught on in the West in the 1970s. To give children confidence early, parents kept reinforcing their self-esteem as they grew up. That sharpened the children’s self-centered tendencies and left them unable to think of others or to take a setback.

“Helicopter parents” have drawn their share of criticism too — the term describes parents who hover over their children like a helicopter. A study in the Journal of Child and Family Studies found that this over-attentive style of parenting interferes with the development of a child’s autonomy and competence. Helicopter parenting increases dependence and weakens the ability to finish a task alone.

And in China? In fact, QDaily Research Lab’s survey suggests that too much encouragement is not the main problem here: the style of upbringing people say they “went through and would least want to pass on to their own children” is the crushing kind. As for school, the things people say they “realized after graduating were important but never properly learned” are, first, “getting along with people and expressing yourself,” and second, “basic logical thinking.” In an environment where the exam matters more, the qualities most closely tied to a person’s growth get left aside.

4. Mass Culture Keeps Getting More Childish

A while ago it was said that the popularity of the selfie shows how narcissistic people are, and that posting pictures on social media and touching yourself up with filters makes the narcissism worse. Selfies only amount to narcissism past a certain level of obsession, and most people’s habit hasn’t reached that pathological point — but the complaints about social media have never gone away. One argument holds that children used to watch how adults behaved by spending time with them, while heavy use of electronic devices and phone-based contact now puts more of their time with people their own age. Bauerlein, a researcher at Emory University, considers the trend anti-intellectual.

On the influence of mass media, Neil Postman argued in The Disappearance of Childhood that in the age of images, news and advertising are pitched at the level of a ten-year-old. That has blurred the boundary around childhood and, at the same time, made it harder for people who have reached the legal age of adulthood to cross into it in their minds.

5. The Final Blow: Consumer Society

Consumer culture may deserve the last share of the blame.

In an environment of consumerism that is fast, overstocked, and scattering of attention, consumption itself becomes a faith. People chase the perfect image society approves of, and young people’s desire for self-fulfillment rests to a considerable degree on materialism — which is not, in itself, wrong. But as people put more and more of their attention on recording and quantifying what they eat and how they exercise, or on studying their own genes, the center of their lives really has shifted. The wide-ranging argument that once filled the public square has been replaced by niche hobbies on social media.

Because people have neither the inclination nor the time to take part in public life and debate, it is more and more common to find them unable to enter that kind of conversation at all. Talking about public affairs is not seen as a necessary skill for young people today. Meanwhile consumerism offers shelter to anyone trying to dodge public questions: it dissolves seriousness and professionalism and turns everything into “don’t be so stiff about it.”

Before we pin the “overgrown baby” label on every bit of behavior we can’t stand and attack it, perhaps all of us could stop and think about how to be an adult in the society we have now.

Graphics by Lin Xiaoyao