Parent-Induced Extended Childhood

Olivia: Do you remember when Steve and Shirl were this little?
Hugh: Yeah. They grow up, that's for sure.
Olivia: Pretty soon, they won't be caught dead like this.
Hugh: Oh, they'll go full Theo on you. You can't prevent it.
Olivia: Well, you know that one. She would never, not even when she was little. [sighs] I wish we could just freeze them. Keep 'em just like this forever...

—The Haunting of Hill House (2018), "Screaming Meemies"

Sad to say, it's not uncommon for parents to treat their offspring like children even after they've turned eighteen. However, no matter how domineering they may be, some comfort can be found in the fact that parents like this don't actually have the power to keep their kids from growing up...

...most of the time.

In fiction, some especially controlling parents take drastic steps to make sure their beloved children never physically age past a certain point, never mentally or emotionally mature to adulthood, or, in cases where they already have grown up, regressing them to childhood — all "For Your Own Good", of course. For good measure, it's very common for the parent to be some kind of immortal as well, especially given that this infantilizing mindset is often accompanied by the belief that only they can defend their child.

The means of accomplishing this can involve anything from the magical to the comparatively mundane, but with a few notable exceptions, the actual motive at its purest tends to be very simple: the parent cares so unhealthily for their child that they can't face the prospect of "losing them" to adulthood — either because they fear being replaced by lovers or spouses, because they fear for their child's innocence or safety, or simply because the parent can't stand not having a child to care for (in which case Münchausen Syndrome By Proxy may be involved). The exceptions can be more laudable, or they can be more reprehensible, but the end result of this trope is almost invariably the same: Not Growing Up Sucks.

Needless to say, this trope can very easily be classified as abuse and is usually only enacted by the most dangerously obsessive of parents (be they biological or adoptive), including the Knight Templar Parent, dark cases of Helicopter Parents, and only the most toxic forms of Mama Bear and Papa Wolf.

Fortunately, victims of this trope may be able to "break the spell" and return to normal aging; in the process, the parent may be subjected to an Anti-Smother Love Talk, even forced to acknowledge that it was wrong of them to deny their child the chance for a happy adult life. In more cynical stories, though, this extended childhood cannot be undone, and the parents who inflicted it will go unpunished and unmoved.

Also, don't be surprised if some kind of Nightmarish Nursery is involved.

A subtrope of All Take and No Give.

Contrast Hands-Off Parenting and Parental Neglect. Compare Raise Him Right This Time, which can also be inflicted by parents but is usually regarded in a more positive light.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• In Tokyo Ghoul, it's revealed that Juuzou Suzuya was subject to a particularly monstrous form of this by his Ghoul mother: along with other tortures, she castrated him before he hit puberty so that he wouldn't properly grow up and lose his childish good looks.

Comic Books

• In the horror comic book Horde, Ruby Ando's attempt to reconnect with her hoarder mother Mia goes horribly wrong when the ever-expanding hoard is found to be a sentient force keeping her imprisoned through her obsessions. After fighting her way through the labyrinthine collection and reaching her mother again, Ruby tries to get through to her one final time... only to be regressed to childhood and transmuted into a doll — essentially, the perfect daughter for a controlling parent who would rather treat Ruby as a possession than a person. Oblivious to what's just happened, Mia gathers the doll up in her arms and begins cradling her like a real baby, and it looks as if Ruby is going to stay this way... However, after remembering how happy she was in the days before her hoarding desires overcame her, Mia is finally able to overcome the spell of the Hoard, restoring Ruby to normal.

Fan Works

• Best Friends Forever: After Fluttershy dies of old age, Twilight can't bear the thought of outliving any more of her friends. She isolates herself and the remaining members of the Mane Six in a castle where she magically de-ages them into babies, raises them from foalhood to adulthood, and turns them into babies again when they get old, a cycle she repeats for centuries.
• In the final chapters of The Land of What Might-Have-Been, it's revealed that the daughters of the Radiant Empress were hit with a biological weapon fielded by the Deviant Nations, causing them to begin manifesting the green skin their mother was born with. Unable to cure this condition, the Empress began dosing Elarose and Essella with a diluted version of Morrible's botched immortality serum, regressing them to childhood so they could retain their youth while she continued looking for a cure. However, it's also revealed that the Empress has since begun using this as a means of controlling them, not only regressing her daughters when they start growing up again but every time they grow rebellious or express an opinion that she disapproves of. By the time Elphaba finds them, Elarose and Essella have been imprisoned in a Gilded Cage for decades, but still look like they're only nine years old and believe that they've only been confined for a week.
• In the BioShock Infinite fanfic A Life With Vigor, one chapter discusses alternate Columbias where more unusual Vigors were developed. One of them, "Father Time", became particularly popular with Columbian parents: the Timekeepers were often hired to regress rebellious teenagers to infancy for the sake of "reforming" them into model citizens; also, on a less official basis, they could be hired by controlling parents who wanted to keep their children from leaving the nest — either by regressing them back to infancy as many times as desired or simply by creating a temporal field around the nursery and preventing the kids from aging at all.
• The Sherlock fanfic A Small Miscalculation features Sherlock being regressed to childhood by none other than his own mother as part of a gambit to Raise Him Right This Time, even kidnapping him halfway through the story to ensure that everything goes according to plan. Worse still, a horror-stricken Sherlock eventually realizes that his mother will continue using the youth serum on him until his mind breaks under the strain, leaving nothing of his original personality or memories.
• In Ultra Fast Pony, Spike is 67 years old but still looks like a child and is treated accordingly. In "For Glorious Mother Equestria!" he starts showing signs of going through puberty, but in keeping with her My Beloved Smother characterization in this abridged series, Twilight (his adoptive mother) uses magic to de-age him back to childhood... and dialogue in "The Longest Recap" confirms that this a regular occurrence.

Film

• The Baby: Mrs. Wadsworth and her two daughters have spent years keeping her son from maturing mentally, ensuring he retains the mindset of an infant despite being biologically twenty — to the point that they are more than willing to zap him with a cattle prod if he even tries standing upright. As such, the crux of the film involves a social worker attempting to get "Baby" away from Mrs. Wadsworth so he can achieve psychological adulthood... except it turns out that she has no intention of doing such a thing at all, instead adopting Baby so he can become a brother to her husband, who has been left in a similar state due to brain damage sustained in a car crash.
• As with the original novel, Interview with the Vampire features Lestat making young Claudia into a vampire as a surrogate daughter to keep Louis from leaving him. As a vampire, she doesn't physically age — but she continues to emotionally and mentally mature, so Claudia gradually chafes at being treated like a child by Lestat, who insists on showing her off to neighbors as a piano-playing Child Prodigy and still lavishes her with toys despite her being several decades old by that point. Even Louis can't help talking down to her like she's a little girl. However, after the two of them seemingly murder Lestat (twice), Louis goes on to treat Claudia more like an adult during their time in Paris.
• Occurs symbolically in The Wall: during "The Trial", Pink imagines himself being taken to court for his character flaws, with monstrous incarnations of people from throughout his life testifying against him. One of them is his notoriously controlling mother, who literally connects herself to Pink via an umbilical cord and spends most of her time in the spotlight holding Pink's shrunken, doll-like form in her arms like an infant as she begs for the judge to let her take her condemned son home.

Literature

• Played with in Codex Alera. At the start of the cycle, Tavi is a 15-year-old orphan but looks much younger. As well, he cannot manifest any Furycrafting powers, which usually awaken at age 12-13 in his peers. This is eventually revealed to be due to the manipulations of his aunt Isana, who is actually his mother and has used her powerful Watercrafting to fake Tavi's age and to prevent the onset of his powerful Furycrafting. She did it to prevent anyone from realizing that Tavi's father was none other than Gaius Septimus, the late heir apparent to the Aleran empire, making Tavi the only legitimate heir to the throne.
• Discworld: Death adopted Ysabell when she was an orphaned infant, and had to make special arrangements for her to grow up at all, since Death's domain is a Place Beyond Time and by default age doesn't touch those who reside there. He left off when she was sixteen, believing that she'd grown up enough — a sign that, while he cared for her in his own eldritch way, he still doesn't really understand how mortals work. By the time of Mort, Ysabell has been a sixteen-year-old (with all the attached emotional foibles) for thirty-five years and the isolation is getting to her. She ultimately chooses to leave with Mort and live a human life; though initially left with the impression that Mort seduced her, Death ultimately lets her leave and marry Mort with his blessing.
• In Interview with the Vampire, the vampire Lestat "adopts" a dying child and makes her into a fellow vampire as part of a gambit to keep Louis by his side out of obligation to their "daughter". The girl, Claudia, is left frozen eternally in childhood and often treated like a child even once she mentally matures into an adult; this naturally results in considerable resentment and eventual hostility when she realizes that she's never going to grow up.
• In My Sweet Audrina, Damian does his damndest to keep Audrina this way by essentially confining her to the house and keeping her emotionally and financially dependent upon him. When she manages to elope behind his back, he simply takes up where he left off when she returns — and starts to work on putting her new husband in the same position.
• In The Postmortal, once the "cure" for biological aging becomes common throughout the world, certain parents begin using it on their children — hence referred to as "Peter Pan cases". In one of the newspaper articles collected alongside the main plot, a mother ends up piquing the suspicion of her neighbors when her baby daughter never ages or grows in any way; an investigation quickly reveals that the woman gave her child the cure so that she'd never grow up and leave her. Worse still, since the baby can't age, her mind will never develop either. The article concludes with the mother going to prison for child abuse.
• In The Twilight Saga, it's mentioned that some vampires would intentionally create "immortal children", turning little children into eternally young vampires. Their vampire parents often found them enchantingly adorable... but unfortunately, these children were unable to emotionally and mentally mature, meaning they never acquired the self-control to moderate their hunger for blood; combined with their powers, this often led to them wiping out entire towns in their tantrums, so the Volturi ruled that any immortal children and those who created them would be executed.
• In "Wings of Fire", in "Darkness of Dragons", Foeslayer has a descendant named Darkstalker. At the end, Kinkajou invented a strawberry to feed him. He eats the strawberry and turns into an one year old dragonet. Foeslayer renamed him Peacemaker (renaming herself Hope) and was in on it, because she wanted him to have a better life, to be better, and always to be with her, always as Peacemaker, with all his memories as Darkstalker wiped. One thing could redo all this, though, if an enchanted earring from Qibli was to be put on Peacemaker, he would turn back into Darkstalker, but vaporize into nothing due to his immorality spells becoming nullified.

Live-Action TV

• In The Act, abusive mother Deedee not only keeps her daughter Gypsy Rose sick for the sake of Fake Charity but also tries to prevent her from growing up as literally as possible via real-world methods. It's left ambiguous if this is to make it easier to scam money and other material benefits from well-meaning observers, to make her easier to abuse, or some combination of the two. Either way, Deedee starves Gypsy Rose, keeps her medicated, subjects her to unnecessary medical treatments, gaslights her into believing that she's much younger than she actually is, and forces her to make use of Age-Inappropriate Dress — such as Disney princess costumes.
• American Horror Story: Hotel features the adoptive variant: Countess Elizabeth is in the habit of "adopting" children and making them into vampires so they can remain hers forever. By now, she has four in total, and all are kept cloistered away in a Nightmarish Nursery concealed deep within the hotel, where they are allowed all the candy, cartoons, and videogames they could possibly want... at the cost of occasionally donating blood to their adoptive mother's private stash. Most of them are chronologically adults by now, and it's implied that some — like Wren — are mature enough to understand adult concepts like self-sacrifice, but the Countess insists on treating them as children. One of them is none other than Holden, the missing son of Detective John Lowe.
• American Horror Story: Murder House:
  • Chad and Patrick are both desperate to claim Vivien and Ben's baby as their own, both to have something to keep them together and to give them something to do in their eternity together as ghosts. Chad offhandedly mentions that he plans to smother the child while it's still "young and cute", though this doesn't end up happening — because they end up having yet another breakup and abandon the plan out of sheer despair.
  • Zigzagged by Nora Montgomery. Having lost her baby to a horrific kidnapping/murder/resurrection in the 1920s, she is obsessed with getting her baby back and latches onto Vivien and Ben's one surviving baby as a substitute — to the point that she might be willing to go through with Chad and Patrick's plan. However, she doesn't bother with either killing or keeping the baby, if only because she finds herself incapable of putting up with said baby's crying once she has him; as it happens, Nora wasn't much of a mother when she was alive and hasn't changed in death, so she wearily returns him to Vivien of her own free will.
• Played with in the Doctor Who episode "Forest of the Dead". In the finale, it's revealed that the library's central computer CAL is actually a little girl named Charlotte Abigail Lux. Her father incorporated her into the system in order to save her from a terminal illness, allowing her eternal youth and all the books in the universe to read. For good measure, her family kept her existence a secret in order to prevent her from becoming a freakshow to the rest of the galaxy. As benevolent as this move was, it's implied that CAL isn't happy with it, as her Lotus-Eater Machine features her living an ordinary life on Earth with her father (who has been dead for decades in the real world). In the finale, River Song is uploaded to the system after her Heroic Sacrifice, allowing her to become a surrogate mother of sorts to CAL.
• In the Eerie, Indiana episode "Foreverware", identical twins Bertram and Ernest have been prevented from aging past the age of twelve for the last thirty years, thanks to being forced to sleep in containers of the eponymous time-freezing substance every night by their controlling mother. Worse still, said mother also sleeps in a Foreverware container. The episode ends with Marshall opening the twins' container, allowing them to do the same to their mother; overnight, all three of them age by thirty years, allowing Bert and Ernie to take on adult lives at long last.
• The Haunting of Hill House (2018):
  • Early in the episode "Screaming Meemies", Olivia Crain absently wishes that she could keep Luke and Nellie frozen at their current age. Over the course of the episode, Hill House's malign influence uncovers the hidden anxieties behind this innocent wish, slowly driving her to madness with horrific visions of what might happen to her children when they grow up. Eventually, Olivia is manipulated into taking drastic steps to keep her youngest children safe and young — namely by killing Luke and Nellie with rat poison at a tea party in the Red Room so that they can live forever as ghosts. Hugh is able to stop her from completing the attempt and flee the house with the children in tow before she has a chance to try again, prompting Olivia to kill herself... but unfortunately, her efforts to "preserve" her children continue as a ghost, eventually resulting in the death of an adult Nellie.
  • In "Silence Lay Steadily", Olivia and the House do their best to keep the now-adult Crain children trapped in the building with the intent of keeping them there for eternity. For good measure, the Red Room is revealed to be a Lotus-Eater Machine for mortals and ghosts alike, so Olivia can live out her fantasy of keeping her sons and daughters as children forever once they're dead. This is aptly demonstrated when Luke is reunited with the ghosts of his mother and little sister in the Red Room, where Nellie has been made to look like a six-year-old again and Olivia is trying to get Luke to join them at another deadly tea party, even baiting him with the "Big Boy Hat" he loved wearing when he was six.
• The Law & Order episode "Falling", inspired by the "Ashley X" controversy, involves parents planning on subjecting their severely developmentally disabled daughter to a medical procedure that would prevent her from going through puberty and growing to her full height, essentially ensuring she remains in a childlike body forever. As such, a good deal of the court debate concerns the ethics of the procedure and whether it's really being done for the daughter's comfort or the parents' convenience.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: The episode "Pathological" is another Ripped from the Headlines version of the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case. Here, Mariel McLaughlin was kept in a childlike state by her mother Dawn, never taught any of the natural aspects of growing up, and also kept deliberately sick through unnecessary medication. This led to her accidentally accusing a boy in her class of rape because she didn't know the difference between rape and consensual sex. She murdered Dawn when she realized the extent of her deception — and that her mother was going to try and keep them apart.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): Subverted in the episode "Young Man's Fancy". A newlywed couple visits the husband's childhood home, resulting in a series of bizarre events that conclude with said husband regressing to childhood. The wife is convinced that the ghost of her husband's late mother is to blame for this, haunting the house and trying to claim the lion's share of his loyalty. However, the mother-in-law reveals that she isn't to blame for any of this: she's been drawn back by her son, who wants to return to his childhood out of sheer nostalgia and openly states that he doesn't need anyone else but her. Realizing that her husband has rejected her of his own free will, the wife flees the house in despair.

Video Games

• In Skullgirls, Annie's mother used the Skull Heart to wish for Annie to remain eternally young, keeping her frozen at fifteen years of age. For added annoyance, the wish has also prevented Annie from swearing.

Webcomics

• In Leftover Soup, Lily runs a tabletop adventure for her friends in a sci-fi setting where humanity lives under universal population controls. Her friend Nicole is horrified by this idea and is initially sympathetic to the game's antagonists, an outlaw group called Right to Motherhood. Nicole changes her tune when she learns that the RtM members the players are investigating have been artificially delaying their children's growth in order to keep them "cute".

Web Videos

• Zig-zagged in Nightmare Time. In the episode 'Daddy', Sherman Young's mother continues to treat him like a little boy despite him being a grown adult. However, it's revealed that she's immortal and drains the life-force of others to maintain her youth, and she allowed Sherman to age, having been easily capable of keeping him looking the age she'd prefer to think of him as. Sherman then decides to do this to himself since he likes being treated like a kid.

Western Animation

• In the American Dad! episode "1600 Candles", Steve enters puberty, as signified by him getting his first pubic hair (which he is very proud of). His parents are immediately anxious, as they still haven't fully recovered from Hayley's pubescent rampages, so Francine tries to stunt Steve's growth by injecting him with a CIA formula... only for her to accidentally use too much and de-age him into a five-year-old, much to Steve's outrage. Worse still, Francine prefers him this way. Unfortunately, when Stan tries to kill two birds with one stone by accelerating Steve past puberty and directly into adulthood with another formula, he ends up overdoing it too, this time aging Steven into an old man.
• Justice League: Morgaine Le Fey has placed enchantments on her son, Mordred, to give him eternal youth and eternal life. Mordred only agreed to this if he could eventually end up on the throne of Camelot, and after waiting for centuries without success, he's gotten tired of remaining a child under Morgaine's thumb — so, as soon as he acquires a source of supreme magic in "Kid Stuff", he banishes all adults (including his mother) to another realm. In desperation, Morgaine de-ages members of the Justice League so she can send them back in her stead to defeat her wayward son, and over the course of this battle, Batman tricks Mordred into removing the enchantment that gave him eternal youth. This turns out to be a very bad thing for Mordred; worse still, having been reduced to an undying old man, he finds that his mother is once again required to look after him.
• The Simpsons: In "Behind the Laughter", in which the family is portrayed as Animated Actors, Lisa writes a tell-all book about the show and reveals that she was secretly given anti-growth hormones as a way of prolonging the series' run.
  Homer: That's ridiculous! How could I even get all five necessary drops into her cereal? [beat] What?

Real Life

• The Ashley treatment is an extremely controversial real-life example of this: designed to improve the quality of life of a patient with severe brain impairment, the treatment deliberately stunts her growth, eliminates menstrual cramps and bleeding, and prevents the growth of breasts. For good measure, given that "Ashley X" was showing signs of puberty at a comparatively early age (common in children with severe brain damage), the treatment was enacted when she was six years old. Her parents have argued that this prevents their daughter from suffering from maturity-related issues she isn't equipped to deal with, even suggesting that it will also prevent her from being sexually abused as well. The ethics of this treatment have been fiercely debated ever since then, as have similar treatments enacted in the decades since then.
• The domestication of animals, most obviously with dogs, has frequently resulted in their adults retaining physical and mental traits previously associated with the juveniles of their wild ancestors. A Chihuahua, for example, has the size, shape, and "childish" personality of a wolf cub. This neoteny has made it easier for humans to control domestic animals.

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