Watching Like a Kid: Connections between Kidults and Children’s Media

There is currently tension concerning American adults’ relationship to children’s media. While many adults are deeply invested in children’s media, many Americans have a very real disdain for such adults. This article theorizes how children’s media work to navigate this tension by reimagining the connections between such media and American adults. I argue that the kidult became relatively mainstream because children are being treated more like adults and because adults today often do not adhere to an adulthood defined by an economic situation that no longer exists, leading to adults who exist between the two spaces. These kidults have not lived the childhoods or adulthoods sold to them by various kinds of media, so they reimagine what it means to exist between the two non-existent images, bringing their childhood desires into their adulthoods. Children’s media then encourage people to continue engaging with media from their childhoods long into their adulthoods, marketing to and benefitting from this new figure of adults with childlike tastes. I argue that American kidulthood can only be understood through its relationship to children’s media as both media audience configurations and cultural constructions of age shift toward blurred boundaries between childhood and adulthood.