So, there's now a preschool for adults

Most children of preschool age are keen for life to speed up so they can finally achieve what they want to be "when they grow up". A group of New Yorkers, on the other hand, have set up a "preschool for adults" where grownups can indulge in their desires for snacks, nap time and finger painting.

'Preschool Mastermind' is a short course, of sorts, set up by New York media personality Michelle Joni. Of the adult preschool, Joni says, "We'll explore preschool concepts, like sharing and friendship, in order to apply and inject play, wonder, self-belief, and community into our grown-up lives."

The first month-long "term" of Preschool Mastermind ran earlier this year; another is planned for fall. Cosmopolitan writer Amanda Devereux attended the initial course and wrote extensively about her experience.

"For show-and-tell, I brought a pair of statuesque Jeffrey Campbell shoes with a Black Milk comic strip print on them," she writes. "As an adult, it's difficult to find a possession that you really want to take out and show people. I briefly considered my new turquoise Le Creuset teapot (which I am seriously excited about) but thought it might just send the message that my life is so boring that I get a thrill out of heating water for tea."

It may amuse you to know that Devereux paid $NZ457 for the privilege of showing the class her shoes: Preschool Mastermind's fees run on a sliding scale that runs from $342 all the way to $1,028. Pay what you feel! Feelings! Yay!!

Imagine, if you will, an adult human being who is a) so desperate to shuck off the responsibilities and realities of adulthood that they were b) prepared to pay $1000 to do so.

From the kidults of series like Girls and films like Bridesmaids and any Judd Apatow movie, it has seemed increasingly as though the "grownup" is an endangered species in this decade. But while on-screen depictions of kidulthood is one thing, as the growing trend for "inner child" activities demonstrates, the real life infantilisation of adults continues apace.

(It's worth noting that none of these "inner child" activities involve the hard work of Jungian psychoanalytic theory, but more "hooray for everything"-esque games and crafts.)

This infuses our day-to-day lives, too. More than once I have remarked on the bad behaviour of an adult friend or acquaintance only to have someone reply "Oh, they're only young"; I don't buy it. As a colleague of mine once said, World Wars were fought and won by men who'd not yet celebrated their 30th birthday. When did adulthood become something that we only achieve in our 40s or later?

A clue to this may be found in Joni's official description of Preschool Mastermind: "Something you may not know about me is that I have nearly half a degree in Early Childhood Education. I wanted to be a preschool teacher for many years, so that is what I originally went to college for!" Well then, take my money now!

Many have wondered, presumably desperate to understand what is happening, whether adult preschool may be some sort of "weird sex thing". Sadly, this expensive frippery does not seem to be a real-life version of Broad City's nightmarish "adult baby" moment starring Fred Armisen: there does not appear to be anything, well, adult about Preschool Mastermind.

Instead, the moneyed participants are evidently only concerned with accessing their "inner child" via such storied preschool activities as being given pill capsules with smiley faces drawn on them. Really: "Miss Joni instructs us to write what we want the pills to do on the scroll of paper, then put the pill back together, and put it in a little glass bottle with cork stopper, which she encourages us to decorate." Hello, choking hazard, anyone?

It's difficult to decide which scenario is more troubling: the adults among us who are living a preschool life and are blissfully unaware of it, or those who are actual functional adults earning enough money to pay wads to go stick their fist in a bowl of poster paint.

This whole sad shemozzle is even more galling if you consider the fact that actual children are losing the ability (or desire) to play. In a 2013 essay about "the play deficit", Boston College research professor Peter Gray wrote, "play teaches social skills without which life would be miserable. But it also teaches how to manage intense, negative emotions such as fear and anger."

Could this be the true reason behind Preschool Mastermind and other "child for a day" activities of its ilk: as some sort of non-threatening self-help group?

Gray noted in the same piece that "the decline in opportunity to play has also been accompanied by a decline in empathy and a rise in narcissism, both of which have been assessed since the late 1970s with standard questionnaires given to normative samples of college students."

(Oh, a rise in narcissism since the '70s, you say? I'm sure narcissistic adults in their mid-30s wouldn't want to pay exorbitant amounts
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