One day you're going to be a thirty year old woman and you're going to need emotional maturity in order to thrive and to be there for people important to you.
this is just a 'skill issue' as they say. being a kid isn't the same thing as being emotionally immature. in fact, self-identified 'adult children' (age regressors, trans-ages, &c) tend to have a lot of childhood trauma, right? and one of the hallmarks of childhood trauma is needing to get real mature about a lot of stuff while you're still a child.*
*or, well, 'child' is a social construct, and if i told people about my childhood without specifying my age they'd imagine i was an adult at the time, as my activities then are closely associated with adulthood. this inconsistent label, that i was a 'child' based on biology but an 'adult' based on my activities, is very tedious and i reject attempts to label it. it is not my fault, that people think one has to do with the other, just because that is how they are associated in their cultural frame of reference, which i do not share. your idea of 'child' is arbitrary.
it's up to the individual how they treat other people. or how they 'thrive.' there is a lot of variation in what constitutes the ideal lifestyle for someone, and the sort where you form normative relationships with people who normatively participate in society is, surprisingly, not something that appeals to everyone. for some people, that is what hurts them, trying to do that and being worn down by how much they cannot relate to the sorts of relationships and experiences that exist in the social canon. this is usually (in my experience) indicative of a personality disorder and/or psychotic disorder, but so what? we deserve autonomy too, to make of the world what we see of it. and disorders are a social construct too, anyhow.
imagine that perhaps the only people important to me are people who support my identity as a child, and understand me as a person enough to know what to expect of me. (this is a hypothetical; i am neither a child nor a person. strictly speaking, i don't even exist.) i think people who are enfranchised with mainstream social values like 'love' and 'friendship' tend to get a little lazy about understanding each other, and what to expect out of each other, compared to those who are not. because you can imagine the people around you fit into this mould of someone who benefits from these values, which saves you from having to listen overly much to people describing their needs and capabilities.* i have no doubt this works out a majority of the time, but it also paves over everyone it doesn't work out for. 'adult children' (i don't know a good cover term; this one sounds sort of offencive) are among those who get paved over.
*i'm guilty of this too, because i imagine that, barring obvious signs to the contrary, anyone's life would be improved if i gave them food or nutrients that they can trust are edible to them, because it makes them not die. but actually, it seems most people would be resentful of my attempt to help, for complicated emotional and social reasons. i'm at least familiar with the gift economy-esque interpretation, because i do it too; a gift is an attempt to assert social control, place you in their debt, and assign you responsibility. i also sympathise with the generally suicidal or anorexic objection. but in my case, my hunger overpowers both of those considerations, and i immaturely project my hunger onto others. i will likely never grasp the full complexity of every individual's personal attitude towards food, nor probably even social values about food within a single culture, but it's okay, i'm not a sociologist or anthropologist. i'll just try to ask before giving people food, and not expect a positive answer.
this manifests more broadly in what i'd call 'prosocial bias,' which is to say the expectation that because you were born into and depend on a society, you should participate in and contribute to it. people tend to have absolutely no say in what they were born into and what they depend on, just as they have no say in their biology either, so it is honestly very understandable to not want to participate in things, and there's no reason to moralise it or force people to do it. there's this one tumblr post that went around recently, that said something to the effect of, 'oh yeah? if you dislike society so much, then just FUCK OFF INTO THE WOODS see how THAT works out for you.' which is so mean-spirited that i don't understand how anyone expected that to convince anyone already disenfranchised of their position; social shaming only works on the social. but it is a good illustration of this bias, moralism, and refusal to understand.
needless to say the expectation to contribute in particular is very ableist. often people bring this up in an economic context, that you shouldn't be judged for being unwilling to work, but it is equally true in a social context, that you shouldn't be judged for being unwilling to make friends. accepting and not judging yourself for having a disability just comes off to everyone else as an unwillingness to 'get better' and contribute, where 'better' is just some arbitrary normative concept of ability, usually in relation to how they can benefit others. not every disability inspires people to accept it, of course, but you'd be surprised at what people can accept anyway. it is a frequent topic that all sorts of disabled people commiserate over, that when describing that they will have a lifelong disability to abled people, the abled will not be able to immediately wrap their heads around having to put up with it, and say something stupid like, 'and you really can't fix it?' or, 'wow, if that happened to me i'd kill myself.' this presumption that you're supposed to forever want to be like them, just because they're there and they keep you alive; it is harmful, and it is the same in all contexts.
so to return to the specific topic at hand, it is presumptuous to suppose that thinking of oneself as a child will hurt people and the people around them, just because they don't fit some template for human emotion and socialisation that you have in mind. people figure this stuff out on their own. they do what makes sense for them, and they're not going to want to hurt others just because they think of themselves as children. more specifically, i'd reassure that generally these people do not see childhood as mutually exclusive with growing emotionally or learning how to treat people or themselves better; it is moreso to do with rejecting being associated with adulthood in social contexts, because they observe adulthood as an oppressive construct to them in a way that childhood isn't.
but really it's just not anybody's business, in general. maybe to a friend who you've known awhile you can say, 'this aspect of your identity is hurting you; i do not suggest you change your identity, but if you want to keep from getting hurt, you've got to reinterpret it.' but that's not the sort of thing expressed by all caps posts on tumblr
If grown women are getting angry or defensive when being told they are grown women then unquestionably there is a problem.
are we really going to claim that people you've assigned an arbitrary immutable social role upon based on biological factors outside of their control, which they are uncomfortable with for very personal reasons, getting angry and defencive when that assigned role is taken to be an inalienable fact about them and enforced upon them, is a problem? i'm not asking you to compare this to the situation of trans people; i know trans people hate when trans-ids try to claim they have anything in common with them.* but can you not see, even without that, that 'grown woman' is a label that humans came up with arbitrarily, and is worth rejecting in its own right? you don't have to understand why people reject it, but treating it as an inalienable fact about someone ignores how specific, cross-culturally unrelatable, and cross-neurotypically unrelatable your concept of a 'grown woman' is.
*i suppose because trans people have a biomedical mandate to their identities, whereas trans-ids have no medical basis? i am being inflammatory on purpose here, i know that trans people don't like being called transmedicalists, either. but that is what the anti-trans-id side of the argument always seems to be. either that, or it's about which social roles already exist, which just as well tosses many trans people under the bus as transmedicalism does. or just the transparent self-contradiction, 'gender is completely arbitrary, but every other label assigned to you based on your body is biological fact. in fact, biology is fuzzy and permits edge cases; but your labels are indisputable ontological fact. i know this because that is how i perceive you.'
i do not mean to be so mean about this. it just comes off to me as so arrogant to imagine you can assign someone a label that they explicitly disclaim, without even knowing them, without even having a specific person in mind, just an entire category of people. and arrogant to imagine you fully understand what a 'grown woman' is, which is to say, understand how everyone experiences that label based on the social context surrounding it. to imagine you and your perception are the process that determines someone's identity, instead of anything internal to them.
even if you are a descriptivist absolutist and say, 'words are made to refer to things. you are always precisely what people say you are. because that is how words work.' (which yes also invalidates every trans person, but trans people for some reason make that argument anyway, so whatever.) even if you believe that about wordsâdoesn't it just seem to you like a good reason to become alienated from words? and the people who use them? above, i made the case for the right to reject society, in whole or in part. as before, i'd say that you didn't ask to be part of any of that, and you shouldn't have to put up with it, if you don't want to. you can use your own words, if you like, and ignore everyone, if you like. and you'd be in the right to do so, because what do they know about you, really? they can have their words, but you don't need to participate.
of course, society isn't obligated to like or tolerate you for it, either. but it would be nice of them if they did. they're always talking about compassion and dignity and rights and stuff, you know? morally correct ways to treat people. i'd say it's the disenfranchised people that societies should worry about treating well the most. it'd be nice if they did that sort of thing
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