Has anyone else noticed this really weird infantilization thing going on among young adults lately? You have people in their 20s acting like they’re still 9 years old and it’s weird for anyone 2-4 years older to even speak to them.
Maybe it’s because I’m about to be 30 myself, but why does it seem like people are being trained to assume that adults older than 30 are predators in wait?
I’ve been thinking about it, trying to work out what I want to focus on saying. There are two main ways it strikes me:
It sounds trivial to me in the context of pressing issues, like child marriage laws (it still floors me this is a thing that can happen in the US, child marriage); financial abuse relating to vulnerable positions that capitalism puts people in; isolation, individualism, and absence of community that furthers the vulnerability of people.
There is something to it, but mainly because of capitalism; how vulnerable people are and how transactional relationships can tend to be. But putting the spotlight on some adults happening to have an age gap is missing the forest for the trees. I’d also think there’s a major difference between someone who happens to want to connect with you and there’s an age gap, versus someone who is specifically going around looking for people who are younger than them, but this is hard to judge without investigating and figuring out intent.
It’s a human thing to connect with each other. People of all ages can be friends in the sense of enjoying each other’s company and bringing joy to each other’s lives. The dynamic is going to be somewhat different with adult and child because the adult has to act as caregiver and protector, not treat the child as someone they can simply confide with on anything. But the point is, even there, it’s possible for them to have something resembling friendship and it’s vulgarizing of what friendship means to suggest otherwise; I think individualist culture just makes this sound more creepy than it is because you aren’t likely to be organically hanging around a child much unless it’s your own or you work in childcare. In a more tight-knit community, I’d expect it to be more common that “it takes a village” is quite literal and that plenty of adults will have good relationships with the kids in the community, acting as helper caregivers and having human connection with them. That some people may take advantage of friendships, or friendly relations if you prefer, is a valid concern, but that’s where missing community accountability and awareness is the major problem, not friendship intrinsically. Again, I would be concerned if someone was specifically seeking out those who are younger, but that’s not the same as incidentally having human connection.
Like… I don’t know, there’s something unsettling to me about the implied thought process. Almost like it’s implying that human connection is somehow predatory inherently and the only way to stave off predation is to only relate with the closest of peers (even though people of the same age can still abuse each other…). Which really only makes sense if you believe the capitalist transactional mode is what human connection inherently is.
Am I missing something?