Awareness of the phenomenon that I’ll call “the child for life syndrome” hit me fully one day in December of 2005, although once it did I realized that the concept had actually been sinking into my subconscious for years.

While watching a TV show on the band “Linkin Park” I was confused about the ages of the band members. Not one single member of the band was a grown man - clearly they were all still children, each looking about 17 years old. But if they were 17 now, that would put them at 12 when the band released its first album 5 years earlier, and that definitely wasn’t the case. They looked about 17 then, too.

A couple of minutes later an online search gave me the band members’ ages as ranging between 26 and 29, answering the problem in the only way that made any sense - that every member of the band was of an adult age, but in a physical sense was stuck in a weird sort of perpetual adolescence. For a second I wondered whether the guys might have all grown up (in a manner of speaking) in the same neighborhood right beside a nuclear power plant, before I started to see the bigger picture. The guys from “Linkin Park” were no different from just about every musician, male or female, that was their age or younger. Mentally going through the list of the famous musicians who I figured were under 30, I could only think up a couple of examples of people who had actually grown into adulthood. From the males - “Sum 41”, “Good Charlotte”, “Simple Plan”, Usher, Chingy, Pharrell, Omarion, Justin Timberlake, John Mayer; to the females - Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore, Avril Lavigne, Alicia Keys, Kelly Clarkson, Michelle Branch; it was one adult-aged child after another.

The lack of physical maturity in the young musicians was confirmed by a comparison with the musicians who are now in their 30’s or 40’s back when they were in their 20’s and in some cases even their teens. A look at the musicians who I estimated were born before 1975 showed a huge difference from the musicians born later. From the males - “Nickleback”, “Korn”, “Nirvana”, “The Red Hot Chili Peppers”, Dr. Dre, Snoop, Kid Rock, etc; to the females - Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Alanis Morissette, Mariah Carey, “The Spice Girls”, etc; examples showing an enormous difference in the level of physical maturity between the two age groups just kept on coming. Another online search for some birth dates and the years that certain music videos were made showed that just about every single male musician that I had thought of from the older age group had physically matured into adulthood by the time they made their first music video, which in every case was by their mid-20’s, and often significantly earlier. The females had also physically matured into adulthood by the time of their first music videos, and on average they made the videos at an even younger age. In fact, Alanis Morissette made her first music video when she was just 17, and having seen the video as recently as a few months earlier I knew that at the time she was without question physically mature enough to be considered a grown woman. A very young woman, but a woman none the less.

Something weird, to say the least, was going on in the world of music, but the idea that the phenomenon could somehow be restricted so that only musicians were affected obviously didn’t make any sense, so I decided to look over another big group of people in the public eye - actors and actresses. It was in thinking about the world famous movie and TV stars that I started to realize the size of the problem, as the syndrome didn’t appear to be affecting them less frequently than the musicians, but more. Tracking down the needed statistics online showed that actors and actresses were failing to physically mature into adulthood with even fewer exceptions than there were with the musicians (it took me more than an hour before I found even one). Online searching also showed that there are more famous actors and actresses than there are famous musicians - so many more that I won’t name even a few at this point. Since a huge number of actors and actresses, and musicians will be listed with their relevant data a bit later on, giving a partial list now would be too redundant.