by Lynne M. Taylor, American Policy Center, ©2025
(Jun. 27, 2025) — If you remember the Disney version of “Peter Pan”, you may well remember the Island’s name, Neverland. If you were raising children in the late 80s and throughout the 90s, you may recall the commercial from ToysRus. The line from the jingle was “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a ToysRus kid.” In many ways, we’ve seen our culture promote delayed childhood.
In our current time (2025), there are an alarming number of young adults (16 to 24 years) who are absolutely clueless when it comes to the basics of being on their own. What do I mean? Examples like balancing a checkbook, cooking, laundry, changing a tire are just a few of what I’m referring to. But, it goes beyond these types of basics. It’s also mentally crippling our young people.
At one point in America’s educational landscape many of the basic tasks were the responsibility of the parents. For instance, Dad might have taught you how to mow the lawn. Mom might have been the one to teach you how to wash clothes. While there ARE some parents who didn’t let up on teaching their children these things, many other children/young adults haven’t been so blessed.
It might be the parents bought into the sales pitch that only the school could teach, maybe it was the parents were not able to nurture their children for whatever reason, maybe it’s the fact that both parents worked and were unable to lead their families, so they relied on the school system. Or worse, allowed the Hollywood culture to raise their children via massive amounts of media (via TV, computer games, social media).
So, the question is: Is the lack in our young adults all the parents’ fault? Mainstream media is great at pointing the finger in that direction. Based on my years of educational research, I believe that it’s not one party’s fault, rather it’s a definite combination.
The education system has continued usurping how a family lives, learns, believes and acts. Think about how, over the past 20+ years, the U.S. Department of Education has tried to ‘co-parent’ our own children! In more recent years, the word play has shifted from ‘ambassadors’ to “family engagement”. 1 Either way, nowhere in the US Constitution was it ever stated that We the People wanted our government to ‘co-parent’ with us! The ‘sales pitch’ for ‘engagement at a family level: “student success”! It also has led to MTSS (Multi-Tier Support Systems), part of the encircling of the nanny state over the family so that, after all, Johnny and Suzy can learn what the system wants them to. This has been tagged as ‘whole child learning’ and isn’t about imparting knowledge so much as it’s about mind manipulation. Consider the fact that ‘critical thinking’ isn’t kept at an age appropriate level (high school), but is being inserted into Kindergarten, well before the brain’s natural maturation process is ready for such complexities. Don’t gloss over the supposed goal of this shift, either. It’s all about collectivism, not individuality! It’s about grooming people into becoming comfortable with living in a ‘nanny state’ where the government is not only your provider of where you live, what you eat, but also becoming your parents!
While the term “Peter Pan Syndrome (PPS)” first surfaced in 1983, the ideology has also gone on to include “Wendy”. What does this mean? The author (Dr. Dan Kiley) of the book 2 about PPS first focused on the male population as not able to communicate/commit to a relationship/difficulties in holding down a job, etc. He also wrote about how women can also be just as vulnerable to some of the same issues. In 2025, however, the terminology has shifted to ‘wokeness’. Being ‘woke’ isn’t so much about the lack of adult activities you can or cannot complete, as it is about what you believe as an adult. Hence, the mind manipulation aspect I brought up earlier.
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