I once saw an exhibition about the witch hunts in New England. What stayed with me most was not the trials themselves, but the way it described children: in seventeenth-century America, they were an important part of the labor force. That was the moment it really clicked for me that childhood, as we understand it, may be a surprisingly recent invention. Even the now-common distinction between adults and minors only gradually became accepted as social common sense after the Industrial Revolution.
Before that turning point, what we now call "childhood" had not yet become a clearly protected stage of life. On the eve of the eighteenth century's industrial transformation, John Newbery—the figure often called the father of children's literature—published some of the earliest books specifically for children. Even many stories we now treat as classic fairy tales were not originally meant for young readers in the modern sense; beneath the magic and fantasy, they were often brutal survival tales.
Once industrial society emerged, urban life was the first to be remade along modern lines. People began to notice child labor as a problem, laws started to distinguish minors from adults, and a clear tendency toward protecting the young appeared. That was an obvious civilizational advance. But it also meant that children gradually became an important category of consumers. Toys spread not just as entertainment, but as part of social discipline: boys with soldiers and model cars, girls with dolls. Those expectations lined up neatly with what the largest segment of the lower and middle classes imagined for the future—boys heading into factories, girls becoming full-time housewives. Even so, the key shift had already happened: society had formed a broad consensus that minors and adults were meaningfully different. That was only the prologue.
In that sense, childhood is not simply a biological fact. It is a cultural category that only became visible once social and economic conditions made it possible. In earlier stages of development, children were closer to family assets than to protected individuals. The old ideal of having many children was fundamentally tied to labor needs. Education did not need to be deep or prolonged; numbers mattered more. After industrialization, however, childhood came to be treated as a stage that deserved protection, schooling, and even leisure. At its core, that was a luxury made possible by civilization. In the twentieth century, as productivity rose further, that luxury was gradually recast as a basic necessity. In this century, even its status as merely a stage of life may be dissolving.
That helps explain a broader pattern visible in contemporary East Asia: the widespread phenomenon of adult children continuing to depend on their parents is not an anomaly, but a natural extension of the minor status. Once family wealth becomes broadly capable of shielding the next generation, it is inevitable that some young people will simply give up on growing up and instead pass through life under parental arrangements. Historically, that kind of existence belonged mainly to the affluent. Here, adulthood means more duties, more obligations, and often fewer choices. By contrast, an overgrown-child mentality can be repackaged positively as a sense of youthful innocence or girlishness and then circulated as something desirable.
The most obvious feature is not just avoidance of responsibility or self-centeredness, but a deep dependence on outside judgment. That fits naturally with the paternalistic currents long embedded in East Asian culture. Parents are expected to bear nearly unlimited responsibility for their children, only to be blamed in return under the sweeping label of "family-of-origin problems"—sometimes deservedly, but not always to that extent. Young people who seek independence run directly into weak job markets and all kinds of barriers; meanwhile, parents themselves often have no real desire to give up control. This cultural pattern extends easily into political and social structures as well. Strip away ideology, and much of East Asia carries accumulated resentment toward systems of overarching parental authority: either they govern badly, or they do not govern enough. The family-state analogy almost writes itself.
What about the West? In a sense, it is still dependency—only the welfare state has taken over part of the parental role. In East Asia, parents are expected to pay for education, help buy a home, push marriage, and then push childbearing. Some Western states try to spread those endless parental burdens through rent subsidies, student loans, and unemployment protection, allowing parents to remove children from the family balance sheet after eighteen and reclaim their own freedom. But parents who pursue their freedom on pensions are not necessarily more "adult"; that too can look like another form of responsibility avoidance, another kind of infantilization.
And even this welfare model is only viable in parts of the West. It does not even cleanly fit the United States. Many American parents, too, save aggressively for their children's college tuition, and the scale of that burden is not all that different from what a housing down payment represents elsewhere. More and more young adults are also living long-term in their parents' homes. Across the world, education, healthcare, and real estate have all become sectors where productivity gains remain difficult, while weak labor markets and the spread of temporary and contract work reinforce dependence on parents. On this point, East and West are not truly far apart.
Too many social problems get elevated into grand arguments about nations or ideologies, as if every difficulty can be explained by a system label. That is often just intellectual laziness. Modern states are never internally uniform. Most social conflicts arise at the edges created by conceptual divisions—class differences, ethnic differences, regional differences, even gender differences. Many debates are empty battles over categories, but they remain attractive because they offer an easy outlet for emotion.
What is changing more deeply is that people no longer need to become fully adult in the old sense, and modern institutions no longer force them to. Whether there are more people avoiding marriage, parenthood, homeownership, stable employment, financial planning, political participation, or responsibility is something everyone can judge from experience. In a society organized around intense specialization and division of labor, this is a natural outcome. Once you devote yourself to becoming one gear in one part of the machine, you inevitably surrender choices elsewhere. And whether that surrendered authority goes to parents, the state, experts, or algorithmic systems, most people do not really get to choose. As long as optimization and utility are promised, some ready-made guide will always appear.
Modern society also no longer has a true rite of passage. You cannot prove adulthood by hunting a beast, and in all likelihood you will never even face one. You may think that studying hard, getting a degree, and finding a job should make someone an adult. But a degree and a job mostly certify that you are a properly manufactured screw of a certain specification—a qualified component. That is still some distance from becoming an autonomous, responsible person.
At the same time, the practical survival demands placed on individuals are actually getting lower in many respects. You can survive perfectly well in modern society without knowing how to cook or how to socialize well. Much of life is managed by strangers, systems, and professionals. Even many young couples have little confidence in raising children independently. They hope to transfer that burden to experts or trusted relatives in order to avoid the responsibility that comes with making mistakes, as if they were living under permanent legal review.
Still, this is best understood as a phenomenon rather than a moral failing. Modern society has developed in such a way that individuals are genuinely allowed to choose not to become fully adult. People today often become adult only in certain domains and take responsibility only in fragments. That may even be good for economic development, since no individual's understanding is broad enough to grasp society as a whole anymore.
From the perspective of personal life, however, people are indeed handing over more and more choice, becoming more juvenile and more entertainment-oriented. That may help explain why contemporary forms of conservatism still find an audience. At bottom, they are trying to preserve the possibility of the fully adult individual. More progressive currents, by contrast, tend to argue that a new balance requires more delegation and more surrender of decision-making. Give certain professional decisions to parents or experts, and individuals no longer have to bear the pain of choosing. If things go wrong, they can blame family, institutions, or the times. People increasingly organize life around emotional comfort and local efficiency: as long as one part runs well enough, overall emptiness can be tolerated.
Conservatives often want to preserve the social unit of the "complete adult." Progressives, meanwhile, may see that ideal as partly self-deception. The previous generation's life script—marriage, children, a home—was never an eternal law, and in the long sweep of human history it may have been only a brief episode. Some traditions people defend passionately have not even existed as long as the people defending them.
It may be that one outer limit of modern civilization is the complete disappearance of adults in the old sense, and that whatever comes after modernity will need a different ethical framework. Ethics, after all, is about dealing intellectually with conflicts that cannot be avoided. Modern society once created a distinction between minors and adults; later development has mainly stretched the period of minority ever further, perhaps as far as an entire lifetime. If someone can avoid those unavoidable conflicts forever, then perhaps adulthood is no longer necessary at all.
Looking back across several thousand years of civilization, moments of crisis and decline often seem to contain some version of the same absence: a failure of adult rationality. Nomadic invasions, civil bureaucracies gone rotten, ruling classes obsessed with immortality or pleasure—again and again, decline appears when those at the top refuse to mature along with their age. Civilization itself slowly comes of age through cycles of rise and fall, only to grow young again at the height of modern prosperity.
That does not mean war and suffering are desirable instruments for forcing people to grow up. A modern order organized around entertainment and consumption has, to a large degree, removed the kinds of hardship that haunted humanity for centuries. What remains is a different question, one left to each person: whether to grow on one's own.
There is no clear right or wrong here, and no standard answer waiting at the end.