24Sep
Why Adults Are Starting to Love Stuffed Toys
Stuffed toys 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 sleeping with a bunny every night at 30,” the actor Margot Robbie joked on “The Late Late Show With James Corden.” Yet it’s not uncommon: Surveys have found that about 40% of American adults sleep with a stuffed animal. And stuffed toys have become more popular among adults in the past few years.
Gen Z is at the forefront of embracing plush toys: 65% of Squishmallows buyers are 18 to 24 years old. “It went from being awkward … to what it is today, with Gen Z and millennials playing with it with pride,” toy industry consultant Richard Gottlieb told NPR. Of course, many people still find it weird or childish for adults to collect stuffed animals. When TikTok star Charli D’Amelio posted a photo of herself lounging with a small group of colorful squishhmallows, 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 child, I wasn’t too interested in stuffed animals; I viewed 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 the plush dragon should be named Belly or Lulu. For my 21st birthday, I was given a stuffed pretzel toy of Jellycat. I keep it by my bed, and I know many of my peers do the same.
Some blame the growing popularity of stuffed toys on social media, where they are cute, nostalgic, and highly shareable. Kanesaka says the global popularity of Japanese Hello Kitty and Pikachu also plays a role.
Others blame the younger generation for being too fragile, as one headline in Philadelphia Magazine put it, “Millennials! Put down your blankets and stuffed animals and grow up!” But the most common explanation seems to be that the stress, loneliness, and uncertainty of the early pandemic led adults to seek the comfort of stuffed toys. “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, aren’t sure 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, the resurgence is part of a larger shift that has been going on for centuries: The boundary between childhood and adulthood is disappearing.
Childhood isn’t always something to be missed. It’s a stage of life fraught with uncertainty: Many children don’t make it to adulthood, dying from diseases that are now preventable. Some work in factories and coal mines from an early age.
“To take an example that’s hard to imagine now,” Joshua Paul Dale, a professor of cute cultural studies at Tokyo’s Chuo University, writes in Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World, “children passing out in pubs was not only common but accepted 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 babies in medieval paintings looked like hardy, 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,” the protection of childhood as a formative stage of life was well established. May even calls the values that emerged then “child worship.” By 1918, every state had passed laws requiring children to attend school. In 1938, the US placed strict limits on child labor. In 1959, the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child advocated for “special safeguards and care” for children. Parents could also expect their children to live longer: 46% of children born in 1800 did not live to be 5, but by 1900 that number had almost halved. In The Power of Cute, May writes that childhood became “the new sacred place.”
As a result, the line between childhood and adulthood seems to have blurred in recent years. “Do we see, on the one hand, children acting more and more like adults?” May writes. In large part because of social media, children are frequently exposed to adult creators who share adult anxieties, leading to phenomena such as the “Sephora Teen” using anti-aging skin care products. “On the other hand,” May continues, “adults are increasingly convinced that childhood is the defining factor of the whole life.”
So, childhood children 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. “Inside each of us is a young, suffering child,” wrote Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh, and the concept of the “inner child,” first popularized by psychologist Carl Jung, has become a popular wellness philosophy.
The concept is sometimes sweet and sometimes almost absurd: We often see posts like “I healed my inner child by collecting dolls” and “I healed my inner child by taking a Caribbean cruise.” On TikTok, a 2022 trend has users posting childhood photos with phrases like “When I’m mean to myself, I remember that I was mean to them, too.”
Meanwhile, the emotional climax of Jennifer Lopez’s new film This Is Me…Now is a scene in which the adult Lopez bends over to hug her younger self and tells her “I love you…I’m sorry.” If childhood is “the new sacred place,” as May suggests, then this emphasis on the “inner child” may be a way for adults to insist that they themselves are sacred, too — and that the inner child deserves to be treated tenderly, even by stuffed animals.
Turning to cuteness may be a way to reject the rigid, overly serious nature of adult life and acknowledge that both childhood and adulthood are in flux. “Embracing cuteness can also be a way to challenge traditional adult roles that have become anachronistic, outdated, and harmful,” Kanesaka writes. Being an adult is about more than just sipping Scotch and paying taxes. “Rather than accepting the idea that adulthood and power only come in one form (that we must be strong and manly), stuffed animals can be used to embrace a softer, gentler version of adult life.”
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, such as bird watching and joining Dungeons & Dragons leagues.
May argues that the shifting boundaries between childhood and adulthood are part of the natural evolution of the human mind. Boundaries will break down, especially binaries: “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 to incorporate these childlike elements,” Dell says. The adult stuffed animal renaissance may just be a precursor to something to come: Maybe one day we’ll all be adults who are still childlike at heart.
It’s not just a matter of keeping childhood mementos into adulthood for sentimental reasons—adults are also buying stuffed animals for themselves simply because they like them, Erica Kanesaka, a professor at Emory University who studies cute culture, told me in an email. 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 brands are Squishmallows and Jellycat, which specialize in nontraditional stuffed animals like cabbages and rainbow ostriches.
Gen Z is at the forefront of embracing plush toys: 65% of Squishmallows buyers are 18 to 24 years old. “It went from being awkward … to what it is today, with Gen Z and millennials playing with it with pride,” toy industry consultant Richard Gottlieb told NPR. Of course, many people still find it weird or childish for adults to collect stuffed animals. When TikTok star Charli D’Amelio posted a photo of herself lounging with a small group of colorful squishhmallows, 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 child, I wasn’t too interested in stuffed animals; I viewed 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 the plush dragon should be named Belly or Lulu. For my 21st birthday, I was given a stuffed pretzel toy of Jellycat. I keep it by my bed, and I know many of my peers do the same.
Some blame the growing popularity of stuffed toys on social media, where they are cute, nostalgic, and highly shareable. Kanesaka says the global popularity of Japanese Hello Kitty and Pikachu also plays a role.
Others blame the younger generation for being too fragile, as one headline in Philadelphia Magazine put it, “Millennials! Put down your blankets and stuffed animals and grow up!” But the most common explanation seems to be that the stress, loneliness, and uncertainty of the early pandemic led adults to seek the comfort of stuffed toys. “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, aren’t sure 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, the resurgence is part of a larger shift that has been going on for centuries: The boundary between childhood and adulthood is disappearing.
Childhood isn’t always something to be missed. It’s a stage of life fraught with uncertainty: Many children don’t make it to adulthood, dying from diseases that are now preventable. Some work in factories and coal mines from an early age.
“To take an example that’s hard to imagine now,” Joshua Paul Dale, a professor of cute cultural studies at Tokyo’s Chuo University, writes in Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World, “children passing out in pubs was not only common but accepted 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 babies in medieval paintings looked like hardy, 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,” the protection of childhood as a formative stage of life was well established. May even calls the values that emerged then “child worship.” By 1918, every state had passed laws requiring children to attend school. In 1938, the US placed strict limits on child labor. In 1959, the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child advocated for “special safeguards and care” for children. Parents could also expect their children to live longer: 46% of children born in 1800 did not live to be 5, but by 1900 that number had almost halved. In The Power of Cute, May writes that childhood became “the new sacred place.”
As a result, the line between childhood and adulthood seems to have blurred in recent years. “Do we see, on the one hand, children acting more and more like adults?” May writes. In large part because of social media, children are frequently exposed to adult creators who share adult anxieties, leading to phenomena such as the “Sephora Teen” using anti-aging skin care products. “On the other hand,” May continues, “adults are increasingly convinced that childhood is the defining factor of the whole life.”
So, childhood children 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. “Inside each of us is a young, suffering child,” wrote Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh, and the concept of the “inner child,” first popularized by psychologist Carl Jung, has become a popular wellness philosophy.
The concept is sometimes sweet and sometimes almost absurd: We often see posts like “I healed my inner child by collecting dolls” and “I healed my inner child by taking a Caribbean cruise.” On TikTok, a 2022 trend has users posting childhood photos with phrases like “When I’m mean to myself, I remember that I was mean to them, too.”
Meanwhile, the emotional climax of Jennifer Lopez’s new film This Is Me…Now is a scene in which the adult Lopez bends over to hug her younger self and tells her “I love you…I’m sorry.” If childhood is “the new sacred place,” as May suggests, then this emphasis on the “inner child” may be a way for adults to insist that they themselves are sacred, too — and that the inner child deserves to be treated tenderly, even by stuffed animals.
Turning to cuteness may be a way to reject the rigid, overly serious nature of adult life and acknowledge that both childhood and adulthood are in flux. “Embracing cuteness can also be a way to challenge traditional adult roles that have become anachronistic, outdated, and harmful,” Kanesaka writes. Being an adult is about more than just sipping Scotch and paying taxes. “Rather than accepting the idea that adulthood and power only come in one form (that we must be strong and manly), stuffed animals can be used to embrace a softer, gentler version of adult life.”
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, such as bird watching and joining Dungeons & Dragons leagues.
May argues that the shifting boundaries between childhood and adulthood are part of the natural evolution of the human mind. Boundaries will break down, especially binaries: “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 to incorporate these childlike elements,” Dell says. The adult stuffed animal renaissance may just be a precursor to something to come: Maybe one day we’ll all be adults who are still childlike at heart.