It’s easy to dismiss the Labubu Craze of 2025 as just the latest in the long line of tulip manias for toys. The fact that consumers are rushing to spend anywhere between $25 and $150,000 a pop on maniacally grinning monsters designed by Chinese-Dutch artist Kasing Lung is eyebrow-raising, but not unprecedented.
But in the 2020s, the script has flipped on who the dolls are actually designed for. Parents once bloodied each other to put the toy du jour under the Christmas tree for their children, as in the so-called Cabbage Patch Kids Riots of 1983, or later skirmishes over Beanie Babies or Furbies. Now men and women are eagerly lining up outside designer toy shops to secure Labubus for the only children in their family—themselves. Collectors, mostly in their twenties and thirties, post Labubu unboxing videos on TikTok with the reverence of a gender reveal party. Recently in Washington, DC, a crowd of Zoomers met up for espresso martinis and photo-ops with their fuzzy toys; in Los Angeles, hundreds packed into a club for a Labubu-inspired rave.
“Disney adults were an early harbinger of an era when adulthood itself is increasingly imaginary.”
This collective mania is symptomatic of a broader crisis: The collapse of adulthood and the rise of self-infantilized, perpetual children as a nation unto themselves. Once, the phenomenon of “Disney adults”—childfree men and women who plan pilgrimages to Disney World, wear mouse ears without irony, and collect limited-edition popcorn buckets—seemed like a bizarre niche subculture. They were ridiculed online as outliers. But it turns out they were simply the advance guard of what’s now being called kidults. Jean Baudrillard wrote in Simulacra and Simulation that “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.” If that’s true, then Disney adults were an early harbinger of an era when adulthood itself is increasingly imaginary.
The statistics tell the story. For the first time in American history, sales to adults buying toys for themselves have overtaken sales of toys for preschoolers. Kidults now account for 28.5 percent of all toy sales in the United States, and analysts predict that share will only grow as childhood has ceased to be a phase of life but a full-fledged entertainment genre that adults now prefer to inhabit.
The kidult is visible across other areas of culture. Consider K-Pop Demon Hunters, the animated juggernaut that became Netflix’s biggest movie of all time earlier this year. Movie theaters now host sing-along screenings of the film where twenty and thirty-somethings belt out ballads and dance while watching a big-budget cartoon. In video gaming, the same dynamic is even more pronounced. The breakout hits of the last decade are a genre called “cozy games.” Titles such as Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing market themselves as escapes for adults too stressed out for “real” video games. In them, nothing bad ever really happens: you farm turnips, decorate houses, or chat with friendly animals. It’s kindergarten playtime, except digital and endlessly monetizable.
We can still pretend there’s a category called “young adult” fiction, but the boundaries collapsed years ago. What began as Judy Blume is now a sprawling YA industrial complex with no age limits. The genre initially targeted 12 to 18-year-olds, but according to a 2024 report, 74 percent of YA readers are adults, and nearly a third—28 percent—are over the age of 28. No wonder that the people queuing up for new Hunger Games installments or romantasy novels are just as likely to be 30-somethings as teenagers. Even the supposedly “sophisticated” stuff on television—The Walking Dead, The Boys, Game of Thrones—turns out to be adolescent fantasy dressed in adult drag. Add enough sex, gore, and brooding antiheroes, and it passes for maturity. But at its core, it’s still zombies, adventures in space, quasi-Arthurian quests, and spandex-clad crimefighters.
And the machine shows no signs of slowing. The upcoming Harry Potter HBO reboot is transparently aimed not at kids discovering Hogwarts for the first time, but at the millennial kidults who grew up with the books and now want a more “grown-up” retelling of the same bedtime stories.
Actor Simon Pegg, who should know given his own turn as Scotty in the Star Trek reboots, once called out the way that “nerd culture” (the flattering term for kidults in the aughts) conquered the entertainment industry. “This extended adolescence,” he wrote, “has been cannily co-opted by market forces. Suddenly, here was an entire generation crying out for an evolved version of the things they were consuming as children. This demographic is now well and truly serviced in all facets of entertainment, and the first and second childhoods have merged into a mainstream phenomenon.”
The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt helps explain how we got to two childhoods—one biological, one cultural. In The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), he pointed to two shifts. First, the rise of fearful parenting: The unsupervised afternoons of roaming and roughhousing disappeared, replaced by helicopter parenting and safetyism. Second, the engulfing of adolescence by social media. Since the late aughts, teens have lived in a self-directed panopticon, seeking validation in likes and reposts. The consequences are everywhere: anxiety, depression, and delayed independence. Fearful children and hyper-online teens grew up to be fragile adults, ready-made for the kidult marketplace.
But Haidt doesn’t go back far enough. The kidulting of America started long before Instagram and AirTagging your kids. In The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Christopher Lasch diagnosed the rise of a fragile, infantilized adult cut adrift from institutions and constantly seeking comfort and reassurance. This post-’60s generation, argued Lasch, believed the lies of the advertising industry and consumer capitalism; that the freedom to consume was genuine autonomy.
It is thus tempting to blame liberals, the children of the ’60s, for the rise of the kidult. Progressives often rebrand infantilization as empowerment: Toys become “self-care,” cozy games are therapy, and fandoms are “community.” To criticize the collapse of adulthood is to be accused of joyless elitism. Conservatives at least acknowledge the problem. Jordan Peterson became famous for telling young men to “clean your room.” Andrew Huberman, the neuroscientist turned podcaster, prescribes dopamine fasts and disciplined health routines. Both offer scaffolding where culture no longer provides it, but their solutions are limited: paternal scolding on the one hand, biohacked optimization on the other. Neither can restore the social and economic institutions that once carried people into adulthood.
Plus, conservatives are hardly blameless. If they were serious about reindustrialization, they’d be subsidizing Labubu factories in Ohio rather than making fun of Gen-Zers buying them. Besides, the right has its own Labubu class. Instead of plush toys and cozy games, it’s young men awash in sports gambling, porn, weed, and violent video games. The rise of Andrew Tate-ism—swaggering, hyper-masculine, permanently adolescent—is no restoration of adulthood but simply Peter Pan in a different costume. A 25-year-old glued to three betting apps is no closer to maturity than one posing with a Labubu.
The consequences are political as well as personal. A society of kidults may seem cute and harmless, but it cannot sustain itself. Fewer families mean demographic decline. Retreat into play and endless consumption means civic institutions atrophy. Adulthood becomes something we cosplay as rather than inhabit in reality. The old proverb goes: “hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men.” The 2020s update might be: Hard times made strong men, soft times made Labubus.