There is something slightly embarrassing about admitting that you miss being a child.
Not the early bedtimes or the humiliation of having to ask an adult to make a phone call for you. What I mean is harder to explain: the feeling that an afternoon could disappear without having been wasted, and an activity could be worth doing precisely because it led nowhere.
Perhaps this is why adulthood has become so infatuated with childhood.
Look around, the evidence is difficult to miss: TikTok is full of disposable cameras, Bratz dolls and Tamagotchis, Jellycats sit in the arms of people old enough to remember when they weren’t fashionable, Sylvanian Families have acquired the strange status of collectable objects: photographed and displayed as carefully as any other piece of contemporary ephemera.
It would be easy to dismiss this as another internet trend, but its scale suggests something more interesting. Kantar’s research into Jellycat found UK searches for the brand reached a record 4.3 million per month in December 2024. The question is not simply why adults like soft toys; it is why, at this particular moment, so many want to be surrounded by things that remind us of being children.
Adulthood can feel peculiarly demanding. We are expected to know where we are going while remaining open to every possibility; even leisure can acquire the language of productivity. Going to the gym is for self-improvement; travel becomes a vessel for us to broaden our horizons. Everything, eventually, seems to need a purpose.
Childhood nostalgia offers a fantasy of a time before this calculation. A game could be played without making us better at anything, or a collection could exist without becoming an investment. A Jellycat is, in this sense, a wonderfully useless object.
Research suggests nostalgia is not quite the uncomplicated comfort we imagine it to be. A 2024 study of nostalgia in young adults describes it as a distinctly bittersweet emotion: pleasurable because it recalls something meaningful, but tinged with the knowledge that the past is irretrievable.
This might explain the particular melancholy of the adult-childhood aesthetic. We can buy the toy, but not the afternoon in which we first wanted it. The object survives; we have changed.
Yet there’s something liberating in this recognition. Perhaps nostalgia does not ask us to become children again, but instead to reconsider what childhood represented before we learnt to measure everything by its usefulness. I wonder if the more uncomfortable possibility is that we never stopped playing at all; adults rather learnt which forms of play were acceptable.
This is where the trend becomes more complicated than simple escapism. Childhood has become an aesthetic, and aesthetics can be bought. The forgotten toy becomes a collectable; the arcade becomes a bar. What looks like resistance to adulthood can itself become another form of consumption.
That is the paradox of nostalgia now: we are trying to escape a culture that tells us to turn everything into something useful by purchasing objects whose greatest appeal is their uselessness.
Maybe we do not want to return to childhood. Maybe we simply miss the version of ourselves who had not yet learnt to ask whether something was worth our time.
Maybe that’s why adults keep buying toys.
Not because we have forgotten how to grow up, but because we are beginning to wonder whether growing up was ever supposed to mean giving play away.
