According to statistics, we become adults around thirty, and leaving childhood is not without conflict or suffering. Modern communities lack rites of passage. Thus, maturing without losing oneself is difficult yet achievable.
Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince calls adults "really, really, really weird." A lamplighter who follows a dumb order, a businessman who counts stars and says, “I am a serious man,” and an aviator who wants to muzzle his sheep... He has no reason to stay on this alien planet.
Adulthood is rarely idealised. Yes, childhood, youth. Marketing even makes old age attractive, fulfilling Brel's promise: “Becoming old without being an adult. The hard numbers show that first employment has climbed from 20 to 27 and first motherhood from 24 to 29 in 30 years.
Two adulthood indicators that are fading. Adults are portrayed as serious, restricted, and worried citizens who pay taxes, work, raise their children to the expense of their own joys, calculate their monthly income and retirement.
Far from free, independent, and accountable. Peter Pan, a character who has been converted into a syndrome of young boys who refuse to grow up, says his life would be an unending abandonment of his aspirations.
Thus, a hero in green tights and a strange headgear represents an era that believes adulthood implies accepting a life less interesting and inconsequential than one had hoped.
American psychoanalyst Dan Kiley coined this disease in 1983, referencing James Matthew Barrie's hero. These young adults who refuse to leave childhood were his target. This sort of person has emotional paralysis, magical thinking, procrastination, and sexual issues. Michael Jackson exemplified this symptom.
This maturity rejection is new. The child took care of the youngest or helped with chores from a young age. Adulthood brought parenthood and his place in the generations.
You don't need to travel far to know that millions of children don't consider becoming grownups. What happened in our corner of the world to make maturity a risk we resist, closing the door on carefreeness and laughter?
“The adult world is complicated, demanding, and de-idealized. We must provide young people the means to dream of adulthood to commit to it. However, this environment is no longer acceptable, says child psychiatrist Marie Rose Moro, co-author of Becoming an Adult, Chances and Difficulties (Armand Colin, 2014).
Half a century ago, an adult was someone who matured enough to achieve their professional, social, and marital goals. According to psychosociologist Jean-Pierre Boutinet, author of The Immaturity of Adult Life (PUF, 1999) and Psychology of Adult Life (What do I know?, 2020), “the problem adult” emerged in the 1980s.
The loss of value of diplomas like the baccalaureate or licence, the succession of economic and social crises, the instability of the job market, and the blurring of cultural, religious, societal, and family benchmarks have reduced rites of passage, once considered stages of adulthood: first home, first job, first settling in as a couple.
Jean-Pierre Boutinet says that today, the adult is not “only” the one who meets life's challenges and is responsible for handling "problems". Why do we want to grow up if it means replacing pleasure with reality, utopia with logic, celebration with duty, and freedom with boredom?