Does society suffer from hypo-adultism?

Many of the psychological ailments people complain of today (and get disability allowances for) are normal phases in childhood:
mood swings
anxiety and uncertainty
social awkwardness
identity confusion

Taken together, these are normal signs of immaturity. In theory children grow out of them: they become adults. In practice however, many no longer do. Does contemporary society nurture a culture of perpetual childhood? A condition of hypo-adultism?

It's fashionable to claim some form of "disability", which has in turn spawned accusations of "ableism" ("discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities"). To be disabled (or "handicapped" as they used to say) once meant being blind, deaf or in a wheelchair. Now it includes gender dysphoria, bipolar disease, OCD, generalized depression and anxiety, substance addiction, and "racialization". 

People used to be praised for overcoming handicaps (polio survivors, for instance, common in the mid-20th century). The Helen Keller example was the gold standard of "rising above". Now people are encouraged to cultivate emotional disabilities, in other words to prolong childhood, perhaps forever. This is the "puer aeternus" or perpetual boy syndrome (whence "puerile"). What people feel threatened by now is adultism -- the expectation that youths become adults.

Maturity, self-reliance, independence, life-long character development … once considered normal goals, these have fallen into disrepute, an ideal of a suspect culture, a "privileged" or "non-inclusive" one that inequitably tries to dominate other cultures. 

If adulthood doesn't dominate, then childishness will. Immaturity will be rewarded in an increasingly dependent class, probably a heavily medicated one. And self-medicated. From the practice of pharmaceutically treating behaviour disorders in children has grown the habit of self-medicating in adulthood. 

Screen-addiction is notable for feeding into this, of course: life as distracting entertainment is another juvenile desire. Demotion of literacy is also part of the pattern -- but that's a larger area of research to explore. Suffice it to say that kids' vocabulary is shrinking in a zooming and texting era, yet kids who know few long words have learned the word "dysphoria". Their disability is not dysphoria however, but hypo-adultism: the fear of growing up. There always was something creepy about Peter Pan.

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