Today I'm returning to one of the blog's recurring themes: words and sentences I find difficult to translate between English and Spanish without them losing their charm or part of their meaning (you can see previous articles in this category: untranslatables).

And today's word is... KIDULT.

According to Cambridge Dictionary, a kidult is "an adult who likes doing or buying things that are intended for children". It's a combination between the words "kid" and "adult". The Urban Dictionary goes a step further and describes it as "an adult who never grew up", and Wikipedia links it to the Peter Pan syndrome.

I heard this word for the first time from an Irish economist, David McWilliams, and as I understood it, he was referring to a very common tendency in recent generations: people reaching adulthood and still continuing to behave like spoiled kids (only with more disposable income), delaying more and more the phase of maturing and taking on responsibilities..

And when you look at it that way, it's a big problem. But the problem is not caused by adults still liking Disney movies or videogames (I don't think anybody is even surprised by that). As I see it, the problem is that we're living an epidemic of lack of emotional maturity and personal responsibility. Because these two qualities don't come automatically as one comes of age; on the contrary, they need work, and it's each person's decision to make the effort to develop them, or otherwise choose the easy way - escapism and excuses.

That's the "official" (or at least the most extended) definition of kidult, and honestly, I find it a bit depressing... But what if we turned it around? Today I'd like to propose a different way to approach this mix between kid and adult, this time choosing the best of both worlds, instead of the worst.

What if we were able to become adults with the soul of a kid?

We would be more conscious and aware; we would realize that being mature and responsible doesn't mean always being serious and never having fun. We would know how to enjoy the little everyday things even more, and how to connect with the excitement, spontaneity and creativity of our inner child. We would dare to laugh at ourselves more (and to laugh more, in general), and also to play, experiment and live life as it comes.

I have to admit it took me quite a few years to learn this alternative lesson in "kidultism", and even today, I'm still learning. I've always had a huge sense of personal responsibility, so up until very recently, my tendency has been to behave rather in the opposite way, what in Spanish we could call viejoven (also very difficult to translate, a combination between the words for "old" (viejo) and "young" (joven), like being young but behaving like an old person).

Having said that, I think I've been making progress lately at becoming a bit more of a kidult (in a good way)... A few years ago, if somebody had suggested buying the girls a ping-pong set for the kitchen table, I wouldn't have thought it was a good idea; today, not only I said yes immediately (thanks Quique!), I also had a lot of fun getting to use it with Eva 🙂

What about you? Do you see yourself as a kidult? Or maybe a viejoven? Which one would you like to be?