Modern Day Peter Pans

Once upon a time, there lived a stunted man who the award-winning writer and broadcaster Jon Savage depicted in his book, Teenage, as a child troubled by his brother’s death and trapped in a “horrid nightmare” of a marriage (79). During his young, tender adolescent years, he endured the loss of his mother and sister. To cope with all the moroseness encompassing his life and soothe his troubled mind, he took strolls in Kensington Gardens where “he began to turn to other people’s children for solace.” This, Savage asserts, “was not only a substitute for parenthood but a reflection of his own self-diagnosed dilemma: He was a boy who could not grow up” (79). For those of you trying to extrapolate this character’s identity—no, it is not Michael Jackson, though his picture in fig. 1 would suggest otherwise. This man was none other than J. M. Barrie, the playwright of the nostalgic children’s production, Peter Pan.

Not only did Barrie create an alternate reality where individuals could succumb to their nagging childish tendencies free of guilt, but he was also the first documented individual to succumb to the allure of this fantasy world. A little over a century later, the number of diagnosed cases of this Peter Pan Syndrome has multiplied in size. This syndrome, formally dubbed as Peur Aeturnus, affects adults both young and old who haven’t fully matured--both mentally and emotionally--out of their adolescent state, and who still possess a maternal attachment to their caregivers. It’s as if Barrie’s theatrical performance dug its way deep into the heart of our society at the turn of the 20^th century, remained sedentary as its tentacle-like roots spread throughout the soil of our subconscious, and sprouted up like an invasive species of crab grass in the spring decades later. Now this epidemic is prevalent among many youth today as researchers work to trace it back to hindrances in their development during adolescence, searching for its causes, and attempting to formulate preventive solutions. However, in all their objective studies they forget to include one of the major voices of youth experiencing emerging adulthood: Hip Hop. While it seems as if the Hip Hop musical culture perpetuates the emerging adulthood epidemic, in actuality it critiques this problem by engaging in issues scholarly sources fail to recognize, and finds a rational solution under the umbrella of the Hip Hop culture/movement.