On the fourth floor of Selfridges, in London, is the children’s toy department. Most of the vast space is given over to soft toys – mounds of synthetic fur, thousands of little beady eyes – and when I visited last Saturday afternoon the customers were almost all adults. I spent two hours there, standing by a tower of little Paddington bears, watching the shoppers in the queue for the till, and it was eye-opening.

Almost no one was buying for a child. I saw two Chinese women with white toy lambs, a 17-year-old boy with a dragon, what looked like drug dealers queuing for Pokémon cards, and a genuinely troubling number of sad-looking women in their mid-twenties clutching long-eared toy bunnies made by a company called Jellycat. Often, the bunny-cuddlers were accompanied by their fiftysomething mothers, and sometimes they’d hold out the bunnies at arm’s length to admire them the way you might a baby. I counted eight of these mother/daughter bunny pairs.

Toy sales in both the UK and the US increased by around 6 per cent last year; more and more adults are buying products designed for children. There is talk of a great age-regression – and by the time I left Selfridges, I understood that it is real.

Half of all visitors to Disney World are now grown-ups with no children

Half of all visitors to Disney World are now grown-ups with no children

This isn’t the same phenomenon as the eternal teenager. In the late 1990s the writer Robert Bly, early guru of the manosphere, wrote The Sibling Society, accusing the young adults of the West of being perpetual adolescents, and those of us who grew up in the 20th century know all about that. We all knew, still know, Peter Pan characters, the men who stayed forever 17 even as their hairlines receded: restless, Porsche 911, not safe with teen girls.

But eternal teens are defined by their appetite for sex and risk. As the millennium came and went, the adults of the West regressed still further, away from rebellion into childhood, backwards from adolescence into pre-pubescence. It was in 2000 that grown-ups started flocking to movies made for children: Harry Potter and Shrek. Adult colouring books and adult ‘plushies’ (soft toys) appeared. The Spectator, ever prescient, ran a piece by Harry Mount on the infantilisation of adult life. Publishers found that books written for 12-year-old girls were being read most by grown women.

This was the first real emergence of the ‘kidult’ market in the West and companies woke up to the profit potential. In Japan, kid culture, or ‘kidcore’, had already taken hold and toy companies were raking in adult money. In 1990, Sanrio – the Japanese company behind Hello Kitty – was skint. By 2000, the firm was worth more than $1 billion. The Kawaii (cute)........

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