Childlike self-concepts, pt. 1: an anecdotal introduction

Academics have begun to study autopedophilia, with a focus on sexual arousal from the idea of being childlike. But there's a much broader phenomenon going on here, and I'm right in the middle of it.

I have to start with a couple of disclaimers. This is a subject that is still being learned about and I’m not an expert because there really aren’t any experts. Even the academics who study this are not experts yet. They’re just trying to describe what they’ve observed.

I have been in ageplay communities for many years. In that time, I’ve spoken to a sample (not a random or balanced sample; I was just socialising) of people, mainly men, who exhibit what the academics call “autopedophilia”.

The word is made up of “auto”, meaning self, “pedo” meaning child and “philia” meaning liking (often used to mean sexual liking). Kevin Hsu and J. Michael Bailey define autopedophilia as being “sexually aroused by dressing in children’s clothing or fantasizing about having a child’s body.”

I would describe myself as an autopedophile, but the way I and many others experience that doesn’t necessarily line up with this provisional scientific definition. So I’d like there to be a term that captures more of what this is about for me and the people I’ve spoken to. This article is about my thinking process so far, and tries to summarise what I’ve learned.

Why do we need a broader term when we have the term ‘autopedophilia’?

Based on my experience, the existing definition of ‘autopedophilia’ only covers limited aspects of a much bigger phenomenon, and for some of us that definition I just quoted is like saying the definition of gay is “a man who gets excited by the thought of a man kissing him”. Like, yes, that captures an important concept, but it doesn’t capture the whole thing, nor is it necessarily true for everyone who is gay.

I would say the group I consider myself part of, is “people who are emotionally or sexually drawn to the idea of identifying with or identifying as if a minor, or who feel their adult physical development or social role is too advanced for them”. 

A shorter, less nuanced, attempt might be “people physically more developed than their subjective self concept”.

That better reflects the diversity that I’ve seen among a wider group of people who might have autopedophilia, but who definitely have something that’s about childhood and their own self-image. In my experience, these folks use many different terms to describe themselves, and they don’t all handle it in the same way.

What’s the breakdown?

So to start unpacking the diversity of those folks, let’s start with the term ageplay. This is a term for people who roleplay as children because they have autopedophilia, or something like it. Ageplay has a (deceptively) simple definition: people roleplaying a younger age than they physically are.

A subset of ageplayers is adult babies. These are also known as ABs or infantilists — that’s people who roleplay specifically as infants or toddlers. They might also play as adults who get treated that way. Other ageplayers might be middles — roleplaying as kids older than toddlers but younger than adults.

Those groups include many people for whom it’s a sexual kink. They also include some for whom it’s a nonsexual or semi-sexual thing. It can even be a proto-sexual thing — not what we think of as adult sexual activity, but a prolonged interest in cusp-of-adolescence experimentation.

Moving on from ageplay, we could also talk about people with emotional congruence with children. These are adults or older teens that see children as their peers or equals. This term appears in academic literature about other populations, of whom more later.

There’s also age dysphoria. People with age dysphoria view it as a negative, discomfiting thing that they can't remain or be a child, or be more like one. They don’t necessarily roleplay, though.

There’s regression, too. People who regress get really deeply into a kind of childlike headspace. That means they’re more focused on childlike feelings in their heads (and less on outward things like clothes or props). Some regress involuntarily, while for others it’s just a very compulsive or rewarding thing to do voluntarily. They really don’t feel like they’re roleplaying at all.

Recently, there’s growing awareness of dissociative identity disorder. People with DID experience having multiple different identities or personalities (‘alters’). Some of these alters can be in a permanent childlike state. (I’m also told that systems can happen without DID).

Finally, there are some rare folk who say that their true identity is as a child. They imagine they would feel happier if they literally were a child and not an adult at all. Some even use the word transage. I’ve encountered only a couple of people who choose this category, and I think it’s more talked about as a theory than is experienced in practice.

Joanne the ageplayer

To try and give a more personalised, relatable sense of all those terms above, I’m going to give some examples, synthesised out of real people I’ve met or talked with, to show how this works.

Let’s pick a random ageplayer. Let’s call her Joanne.

Joanne is a woman of 30 or so. Normal life: likes donuts, sitcoms, gaming.

And since she was a teen Joanne has discovered she gets really sexually excited by the thought of being treated like a young girl, acting out and getting spanked by a father figure.

And Joanne isn’t sexually interested in kids at all; she’s into adult men.

But her whole fantasy is that she has the social status of a bratty little girl who is naughty, gets told off, punished and then forgiven. When she has this fantasy, she’s significantly focused on the older man, but also on the experiences and physical sensations of being little and, in this situation, powerless.

So that’s an example of a specific kind of ageplay. Joanne doesn’t really believe she’s really a kid. She knows she’s an adult —one to be respected as a woman, and not subordinate to any man — and is pretty much happy with it. But she likes to delve into this fantasy sometimes.

Adult Baby Josh

Now let’s take another ageplayer, and this one is an Adult Baby. Josh is gay and twenty-three. He’s a gamer and a stoner, but also at college studying… biology, say. He’s generally a credit to his snowboarding club.

And he has this secret desire, which he’s had since he was a bedwetting kid of eleven or twelve. What he dreams about is being dressed and treated as a toddler, aged two.

At home in a box he has toys and a pacifier and a teddy bear, and he also has diapers. He loves putting them on just by himself and pretending he’s really that age. He fully uses that diaper when he’s in the zone.

But for Josh, unlike Joanne, it’s not quite so much a sexual thing. It’s at least as much an emotional attraction, and if he got together with another AB it would definitely involve them both dressing up, and probably cuddles, and maybe even some kisses, even an orgasm in the diaper. But he’d be uncomfortable if it became just sex. 

Lewis, who wishes he were still a teenager

Now let’s take… Lewis. Lewis is thirtysomething, married to a woman, whom he loves and finds attractive. He does a lot of running. He doesn’t have any kid clothes, but he’s getting kind of hairy on his body. Up to now he shaved his chest and even sometimes his legs and armpits, for the aesthetic.

He tries to keep fairly skinny too. He has a floppy haircut, the same one he had at school, and finds himself attracted to young looking women too. He also a couple of years ago got braces as an adult, which he only somewhat needed.

He hates looking in the mirror where his age stares back. He liked himself better when he was a skinny, wiry, hairless teenager, doing well in school and sport, and before life got complicated. He sometimes thinks about that when he has sex with his wife, imagining them as teenaged boyfriend and girlfriend.

So Lewis would be an example of age dysphoria around appearance, with maybe a little bit of autoephebophilia thrown in — i.e. attraction to the idea of himself as a teenager.

Zac, who still feels like a child

Zac, who is neurodivergent, has a more pronounced age dysphoria and emotional congruence with children. 

He’s eighteen and basically wishes he was eight, not just in terms of how his body and face looks, but also in terms of how he’d like to live. He never got interested in girls or even too much in boys, he doesn’t like alcohol and he’s frightened to drive. In public he sometimes comes across as excitable and immature.

He doesn’t have sexual fantasies per se, but daydreams about being back at elementary school. They’re just fantasies that aren’t about sex but they make him a little aroused.

He sometimes does a bit of ageplay by himself, but doesn’t have the social skills to go on the ageplay or kink scene. The thought terrifies him anyway, because it would mean having to have adult discussions to express his needs and establish boundaries. He’s too little for that.

If you could offer him some magical physical transformation into an eight year old, he’d say yes. He wouldn’t need to think about it. He’s not interested in his life as an adult, and sometimes — this is the darker side — he actually thinks about killing himself to escape it.

Ginny regresses

Finally, Ginny is a regressor, and is at high school. At times of stress, she drops back to the reactions, thoughts and behaviour of a young kid. It’s almost like too much effort not to do that. She has stuffies and toys in her room at home that help her, but like Zac, she doesn’t really think of this as playacting. She’s mentally a kid for the time she stays regressed. She feels no specific age in this state, just ‘little’. She’s not really interested in having a caregiver or involving anyone else at all. She doesn’t dress up for it, and it has zero to do with sex. 

What’s the common thread?

So there is a lot of diversity here, but one common factor. Everybody with this has the idea of a ‘self’ that is developmentally younger than they are, sometimes by a lot. 

And this imagined kid that is with them, this might in their mind be literally the kid that they were when they were that age, or it might be some idealised alternative kid that they weren’t. There’s nothing to say that if you want to ‘be’ a kid that the kid has to be the same gender as you were, or have the same personality or talents. This can be about recapitulating the familiar or trying something different.

There’s a wide variety of words for this stuff, but not a single phrase. You’ll also notice that I said developmentally younger above. We all know the phenomenon of the middle aged person who wishes they were still 25. That, though, is more about holding back deterioration, while this thing is more about holding back development. We all resist age, but fewer of us consciously try to dodge normal growth or emotional maturation.

So what’s the word for it?

When pondering this, I’ve found I like the term ‘childlike’ because that does capture it in broad strokes. There are adults who like to behave in a childlike way. But most of those don’t feel they need to self-identify with a special term. It isn’t a thing for them the way it is with the people I’ve spoken to. As a standard dictionary word, it’s too broad.

Luckily, academics have been here before me. In a 2018 paper by Ian V. McPhail and a number of collaborators, the term ‘childlike’ is expanded to the label ‘child-like self-concept’, which to me seems to fit the more general sense that I have always found myself grasping for. In the case of that study, the authors were looking to find out more about a population where they expected to find a loose conception of the self as childlike.

The term “self-concept” was popularised by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow and includes the ideas of perceived self (what a person thinks they are) and ideal self (what a person would like to be). So I suppose what is described here is people whose perceived self is in some way childlike and whose ideal self might be wholly childlike — and those might disagree with their actual self.

We might expect an ideal self to have attributes like empathy, intelligence, knowledge, resourcefulness and so on. But we struggle to conceive that anyone would want to project themself as less capable and more dependent. So why does it happen?

Progressing toward regression?

Even when I was a four year old kid I had a recurrent desire to be treated like an infant in quite literal ways, with nappies, dummies, spoonfeeding and bathtimes.

These feelings stuck around as I grew so, as an older child, an adolescent and an adult, I’ve experienced a lot of the different types of minor identification or childlike self-concepts that I just listed.

I had a lot of AB and autopedophile fantasies when I was an adolescent and very young adult, and because I had no way of reaching other people into that, all my activities, like dressing up or fantasising I was a kid, or peeing my pants (yep) were all done alone by myself.

By the age of sixteen or so, I remember getting the first painful waves of age dysphoria, really hating my body and the way it was growing hair and my skin was getting rougher. That feeling worsened through my twenties.

I took those fantasies online and shared them with likeminded people. Being able to do this was a huge relief. It didn’t solve the problem that most of the time I had to be an adult, but by offering limited ways I could play out my other self, it made that reality more palatable. Sometimes, with my eyes closed and with the feeling of toys in my hand, a pacifier in my mouth, I could almost believe I was that other self.

How about other people?

For others it’s different. Some say they didn’t experience this desire until early adolescence. Still others first encounter it via exploring their kinks in their early adulthood. It arrives as a brand new idea, but sticks somehow. So it seems it’s different to how sexual orientation emerges, which is nearly always during early adolescence.

When talking to people with childlike self-concept, I’ve often tried to hunt for an Alfred Hitchcock-style clue as to what was happening for them at that age that sparked off the desire. 

Of course, there’s no single ‘trigger’, but some themes emerge. Often I uncover a story of someone struggling with the social or practical challenges of adult or adolescent life. Whether they’re unemployed or a career high flyer, the whole business of adult responsibility feels like a massive stress. It can lead to burnout if they don’t seek amelioration or refuge in rewinding to childhood. 

Sometimes I hear about someone who has been squeezed out of their parents’ or caregivers’ affections by a disabled or demanding sibling or by a parent’s absorption in their own needs. 

Sometimes I hear more serious tales of childhoods blighted by serious abuse or neglect. Frequently nowadays, I hear people describing themselves as neurodivergent or on the autistic spectrum (obviously I can’t check everyone’s diagnosed status). A lot of people I met in person present as ‘geeky’ or socially awkward, sometimes with a rehearsed ’masking’ persona. Some enjoy the way a childlike role allows them to decrease their obligation to communicate verbally. Sometimes I sense one or two traits of ‘vulnerable narcissism’, but rarely the full set.

Sometimes the person has no sense of where it came from or why it became so consuming. Yet, despite the shame, it’s compulsive — even addictive. They might start and stop their secret regressive activities over and over, one day deciding they can manage without them but a few weeks later returning to them.

It’s hard to be this way

Everyone who has a childlike self-concept is in a bind because this kind of self-image or ideal self is not seen as a legitimate want, whether it’s sexualised or not. Someone who craves the unconditional care or lack of judgement that should be part of childhood comes up hard against the fact they’re not a child. And that problem gets worse the older we get. 

So, frustrated and usually closeted, they find a new strategy. Ageplay allows the invention/acknowledgement of a more sketched-in inner child. This child is revealed only to others who understand. Because it is hidden under layers of embarrassment and stigma, it can seldom be brought out in the open: actualised, held, nurtured and fulfilled. To reveal it to a friend or a potential partner invites ridicule and rejection. There are very few ways it can integrate with the whole self.

The childlike folk seeking healing

But integration is very important to a particular group. 

For some with age dysphoria, there’s this strong sense of distress that goes with it. Age dysphorics can feel tortured that they can never fully live out this deeply felt desire to be a kid... or ‘less adult’. The reality they want just isn’t achievable to the same extent that transgender people can pursue through transition, for example, or sportspeople can pursue through training.

This can be a very dark place to be in, because (a) nobody’s heard of it, (b) there is no operation or cure and (c) ageplay here is only ever a consolation prize. Some people really get to very depressed, suicidal states about this impossible gap between who they are externally and who they feel they are internally.

An answer to these issues — in the sense of finding a fix that makes everything feel OK — is too much to ask for. But a combination of introspection and writing and time and therapy, perhaps especially time, has allowed me to sit with the discomfort of knowing I can’t be, say, eleven years old again, and to understand that that’s not the end of all possible positive experiences I could have as a human.

Some people respond to their childlike self-concept through ageplay or similar activities because it’s therapeutic or healing. It needs to be part of their whole self. People who are survivors of abuse or of trauma are well-represented among autopedophiles and among ageplayers. It goes far beyond being a mere trigger for orgasms, even if it serves that purpose too.

Now for the homework

My view of this has been close-up, but also partial. For a long while now I’ve been saying to myself, “there’s something broader than autopedophilia going on here, but I can’t see it all yet”. To me the recurring themes are the following:

• a self-concept that mismatches with one’s developmental age

• unhappiness or disagreement with the social role typically expected of one’s real age

• self-comfort through fantasy or wishing

• a desire to appear or be accepted as more childlike than one’s physical age

• secrecy about this desire, for fear of ridicule or loss of social status

• a feeling that the desire for childlike feelings and experiences cannot be suppressed or put aside by choice, regardless of others’ expectations or demands

• atypical social skills and strong concentration on childlike experiences as a special interest

Not every one of these applies in every case, but my particular use of the term “childlike self-concepts” is my attempt to stick a label on something of which I have only dug up a part.

My hunch is that the common roots of the different aspects of childlike self-concept will be found in neurology. A lot of the emotional desires in this are universal ones, such as a desire for unconditional care or acceptance. In childlike self-concept these desires seem to get codified, even stereotyped into a literalist metaphor. The process hauntingly reminds me of certain non-neurotypical thinking patterns. Conceptualising this metaphor often seems to be followed by longterm perseveration on how to actualise it.

I hope that those studying the topic more scientifically or comprehensively from here on will bring rigour to tracking down a specific pathology and a physical etiology. But while they do that, I hope they learn the lessons of past conflicts and keep both ears open to understanding the subjective experience of feeling like one is a child inside.

Anyway, that’s most of what I can tell you so far. In my next post, I have another aspect of this to raise, which comes from the previous scientific work from which the term ‘childlike self-concept’ is borrowed, and where it lives in a very different context to the one I’ve described above. For now, having given these leads, my job is to sit back (thumb in mouth) and watch with interest what further clues others turn up.

~

Bly Rede was once on Twitter.

Bly spoke to over 500 people (loosely estimated) in ageplay (mostly ABDL) communities over the course of a quarter of a century. The people he spoke to were overwhelmingly male, including a handful of transmales. Bly only spoke to a few dozen women, and this total (of course) includes transwomen. Most of the above were anonymous and spoke via text only, but he met several dozen in person too. The ideas put forward here aren’t an attempt to pass off this otherwise undocumented life experience as scientific research. Bly welcomes efforts by scientists to study all of the above in a rigorous way.

This article was adapted from a podcast interview, which can be heard at thepreventionpodcast.com or read at aboutpedophilia.com.

Edited by Sheila van den Heuvel-Collins

Photograph from unsplash.com