Dialogue: Just grow up - it's not so smart to be childish

By DAVID AARRONOVITCH

Last Saturday night, we left the kids with a priceless aunt and went on a rare visit to the cinema. Usually, I fall asleep during the early ads, and only wake up in time for the censor's certificate. But this time I stayed awake, and discovered that the cinema full of grown-ups was being invited to purchase Maltesers (which used to melt in your mouth and not in your hand) and Smarties.

Smarties? In the days of my adolescence, adults could be invited to buy Turkish Delight from a belly dancer, Bounty from a rather unlikely Tahitian maiden, and Cadbury's Flake from the lascivious lass with the big lips.

These were chocolates for grown-ups, for men and women who would enjoy the pleasure of the cocoa-bean and then - stimulated - enjoy each other. Smarties, however, were for children. Little children. That's why they were so small and coloured, like dummies or rattles.

We should recall here that advertisers test their ads on focus groups before they screen them. So what I saw was what the marketing people had discovered would sell Smarties and Maltesers to adults. And the Smarties ad in particular commanded everyone's attention. In it, a man and a woman in their mid-30s stuck out their tongues to show who had won the competition to make their Smartie last longer.

They might just as well have shown each other their bottoms. This was beyond regression, and I was left thinking that it was only because my own children (aged 8 and 4) had got well beyond this stage that we had been happy to leave them behind.

Is this anything more than a cultural irritation? Ads have always been banal, and why is it any better to sell chocolate with sex than to sell it with infantilism? Because sex is adult, it is part of the world of negotiations and relationships and responsibilities. I don't like to see grown-ups reading Harry Potter books when they haven't managed Nabokov, and men on shiny scooters should be walking or cycling.

The advertisers are aiming their candy darts at what are known as "kidults," something they describe as a new "consumption phenomenon," consisting of "thirty-somethings who are fond of their childhoods and buy brands that they were familiar with as children in the 1970s and young adults in the 1980s."

What's going on? In my case, my long-standing desire for a Scalextric train set (realised by proxy on behalf of the 8-year-old last Christmas) had something to do with it being unaffordable when I was a kid.

Some sociologists argue that the new urge to regress is connected with the uncertain economic circumstances in which many young adults were brought up. They can re-achieve stability and comfort by surrounding themselves with the products and the images of their childhood.

Not every real grown-up thinks this is a bad thing. The Bishop of Bath and Wells has commended childishness. "If we kill off the child in us," he said, "we can become habitually self-important, moralistic, bossy and pompous adults, without any inkling of our own absurdity." And this must be partly right, because you can't hold a Smartie-licking competition with chums without being aware of your own absurdity.

But this tolerance doesn't convince me. Something shouts that this kidulthood is a way of avoiding reality rather than of understanding it. Kidulthood wishes to escape the world rather than engage with it.

As the Scottish writer Pat Kane asked in the Scotsman: "If Toys R Us, then Who R We?" He answered, gloomily, that, "We R infantilised kidults, taking refuge from the world's difficulties in a Disney Universe (or maybe even a Plutopia) of happy endings, gentle humour and endless plenitude."

My psychotherapist friend agrees. He sees a refusal to choose an adult identity and a determination to be everything: to be the adult and the child, the father and the mother, the man and the woman.

He links it, not to economic changes, but to changes in the structure of the family, with an increasing number of single-parent families, step-families and families in which there are no distinct roles.

Women, for instance, are now asked to be mums, chums, professionals and lovers, all at once. The one thing that can be reliably distinctive about them is their childhoods. The problem is that children are not required to negotiate long-term adult relationships and partnerships. So, increasingly, neither do young adults.

If kidults desire childhood, there is an obvious danger for real kids. It's not just that their world will be increasingly aggressively colonised by the advertisers, but that they will be increasingly desired by adults. And the peril for the adult world is even more intriguing.

I don't want to fetishise childhood. And on the whole it seems better to stretch the perceptions of children than to limit the sensibilities of adults. I only realised quite recently that I had been feeding my children on a diet of "kids" animated cinema when they should also have been watching more substantial stuff. But I also believe in something called "man's estate," and the raw virtues of actually bloody growing up.

- INDEPENDENT