The Millennial Midlife Crisis Is a Stuffed Squishy Animal

Why Millennials Are Collecting Stuffed Frogs

There comes a point in adulthood when you have to accept that some things are probably no longer going to happen for you. You are probably not going to suddenly become famous. You are probably not going to wake up one morning with a six-pack, although Ozempic has at least reopened negotiations. You may also never own the house you once assumed adulthood would eventually provide and, if you do, a surprising amount of your emotional life will be devoted to the mattresses inside that said house.

As an adult, you are also generally expected to stop playing with toys. And I am not talking about Wordle, or whatever this year's version of Snake on the Nokia is—remember, fellow millennials?—but actual toys. Especially the sort of toys the children you now likely have are themselves obsessed with, the ones colonizing their beds and every available surface of your home.

And yet, increasingly, adults are playing with those too.

A New Kind of Crisis

In the first half of 2026, toy sales to Americans aged 18 and older grew 25 percent, making adults the biggest contributor to the industry's growth, according to Circana. Households without children accounted for 55 percent of toy sales during the period studied, meaning that most of those toys were going into homes with no children in them. Even more specifically, the research firm found earlier this year that “squishy” toys were posting triple-digit growth, helped along by social media, limited editions and, apparently, the fact that human beings find squeezing things satisfying.

Which brings us to Squishmallows.

What Exactly Is a Squishmallow?

If you have somehow escaped them, a Squishmallow is essentially a stuffed animal that has been deprived of most of the anatomical features normally required of an animal. They are extremely round, extremely soft and available as cows, frogs, cats, mushrooms, axolotls and assorted creatures that appear to have been invented after zoology ran out.

My daughters, who are 7 and 5, are obsessed with them, which seems entirely appropriate because they are 7 and 5.

What I had not realized until recently was how many people closer to my age—mid-to-late 30s, smack-dab millennials—are obsessed with them too. It turns out that they also really want to talk about that obsession and the collections it has produced.

Real People, Real Collections

Jamie Bolker is 39, has a Ph.D. in English and works as a freelance editor and petsitter after previously teaching at the college level. She bought her first Squishmallow at a Walgreens in New York City in 2018, while completing a postdoctoral teaching fellowship.

"When I first saw them at Walgreens I was drawn to how cute, soft, colorful, and relatively inexpensive they were," she told Newsweek.

The collection expanded after the college where Bolker was employed closed in 2020 and she lost her teaching job. After moving back in with her parents, she said she became "a little obsessed with them." She has since given away roughly 10 to 15 Squishmallows but still owns around 65 to 70, ranging from tiny keychain versions to a 20-inch pizza.

The Millennial Midlife Crisis, Reimagined

There is an obvious and rather funny conclusion to draw from all this.

Millennials—the generation America spent roughly two decades accusing of refusing to grow up—have finally reached middle age and, on the matter of toys at least, appear to have decided that everyone was right.

Indeed, we did not grow up.

Bolker herself is unusually candid about that possibility.

"I would say that in a sad way, I've bought so many Squishmallows because I feel like I've been in an arrested state of development and do not have my own children to buy toys for," she said. "I do think that adulthood means you can still like and collect things that may be considered childish, but I don't know that I would say that I'm proud of my collection given that it got out of hand."

Perhaps, though, there is another reading. Perhaps some millennials did not grow up, but others did and realized that adulthood is no fun, so they decided toys were one way to decompress from it.

Stress Relief or Just a Fancy Comfort Object?

Jobs, children, mortgages for the lucky, rent for everyone else, aging parents, insurance, school runs, back pain, retirement accounts we think should contain more money and the creeping awareness that making plans for 9 p.m. now constitutes "nightlife." Many of the people buying stuffed frogs are carrying all of that.

We have also accumulated the anxiety that comes with it all. The particular conditions of 2026 hardly help.

A punishing housing market, economic uncertainty, political anxiety, wars delivered directly to the phone in your hand and an internet economy basically designed to keep you scrolling through all of it. Merely reading the laundry list of anxieties we are expected to have is enough to produce another anxiety.

In the middle of that mess, though, at least in some houses, sits a very soft frog that can be squeezed for relief.

Norman B. Schmidt, chair of the Department of Psychology at Florida State University, said there is a credible psychological explanation for why that might make someone feel better.

"When people become anxious, their attention is captured by whatever they perceive as threatening. Holding or squeezing something supplies a competing stream of sensory information—the feeling of pressure and texture—while the repetitive movement provides predictable physical input," Schmidt explained to Newsweek.

"It essentially gives attention somewhere else to go," he said.

Studies involving stress balls have found reductions in self-reported anxiety and physiological arousal, he noted, with a recent analysis of randomized trials finding a small but fairly consistent reduction in situational anxiety during stressful medical procedures.

Schmidt was careful, however, to distinguish a moment of relief from an actual treatment.

"Yes, I think this sort of activity can help but I would describe the effect as modest at best and temporary rather than therapeutic," he said. "A Squishmallow might \'turn the volume down on anxiety for a few minutes,' allowing someone to regain perspective or move on to other coping strategies."

That temporary comfort is what Bolker remembers seeking as her career collapsed.

"They are very comforting and I like to hug them when I go to bed," she said. "I think I primarily bought them because I was very depressed, and they were a small comfort in a world that I felt like I had very little control over."

A Different Kind of Childhood Nostalgia

Maybe, then, millennials grew up perfectly well but, in the process of absorbing and metabolizing everything adulthood turned out to involve, simply kept—or rediscovered—coping mechanisms that would once have been considered too childish to survive the journey.

A second collector, a 44-year-old content editor by day and illustrator by night who asked to remain anonymous, told Newsweek that he owns about 120 Squishmallows. Diagnosed with PTSD about five years ago, he said the collection has become one part of managing the resulting anxiety.

"Aside from medication, surrounding myself with these has been comforting," he said. "I grab a second Cam we found at a thrift store (who we call 2 Cam 2 Curious) during tough nights after everyone is asleep."

A stuffed animal is not fundamentally different from many other methods of self-soothing, Schmidt said. People take warm showers, pet dogs, hold hands, listen to familiar music and make cups of tea. All use sensation, familiarity and learned associations with comfort to influence how someone feels.

A soft toy may have an extra advantage because it can acquire emotional meaning, becoming associated with childhood, a particular person, a period of safety or simply the repeated experience of feeling comforted. Its texture can also help anchor someone in the present while its familiarity soothes them.

Collecting for Connection

There is at least one reason to ask whether play itself becomes unnecessary simply because someone turns 18. Temple University psychologist Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, whose research includes the science of play, has previously argued that toys can help adults with curiosity, creativity and communication, while cautioning against treating them as substitutes for human relationships. Are Squishmallows really so different from adult coloring books?

Cammy Crolic, an assistant professor of marketing at Florida State University, said uncertainty tends to increase the desire for both psychological comfort and control. Soft, cute and relatively inexpensive toys can supply a little of each. They allow adults to briefly disengage from stress and enter a more playful mindset; they can also evoke childhood nostalgia, which research has associated with feelings of connection, meaning and emotional security.

"What's interesting about cute and collectible toys is that their value often extends well beyond the moment of purchase," she said.

Someone may, for example, share a picture of the toy online and form friendships through a community of fellow collectors. The collection then not only offers escapism but identity and a sense of achievement. When a larger life goal—homeownership, career stability, financial security—feels delayed or beyond someone's control, completing a small collection provides an attainable goal with a discernible endpoint.

The Psychology of Cute Objects

Squishmallows possess another commercially useful quality: Their large eyes, round faces and soft shapes evoke what psychologists call Kindchenschema, or "baby schema," features that naturally elicit warmth and affection.

In other words, the frog has been psychologically optimized for your psychological consumption.

Shopping Your Feelings

There is also a third possibility—one that does not involve either our failure to grow up or our desire to retreat into an anxiety-free childhood.

Perhaps millennials have simply learned to shop their feelings.

"Self-care" has performed miraculous linguistic work on consumer spending, with candles becoming wellness, skin care becoming an act of self-respect and, somewhere along the way, buying yourself a stuffed cow becoming emotional regulation. Children grew up, certainly, but acquired checking accounts in the process. Given the sales figures, this is no longer merely a cute little subculture but a market.

According to the figures, adults are spending real money on toys made for children. Social media encourages collecting and accelerates the hunt for limited editions, and companies have discovered an enormously lucrative customer who possesses a child's appetite for cute objects and an adult's ability to buy them without asking mom.

Bolker again recognizes herself in the less flattering interpretation.

"I think that my collection is very much evidence for shopping my feelings," she said. "I think it started out as pleasant and harmless but then got excessive."

At one point, she said, the Squishmallows were piling up toward the ceiling of her bedroom. Many now sit in storage tubs in her parents' basement. She still keeps a few in her room and on her bed, but said her memories of the collection are "tinged with a bit of sadness."

Her experience complicates any easy claim that buying a stuffed animal is self-care simply because it feels comforting. A purchase can provide relief and still become excessive as the same object can be both a coping tool and evidence that the coping has begun to do too much of the work.

The Line Between Comfort and Control

Schmidt draws the line in much the same place. Squeezing a stuffed animal during a difficult phone call, feeling calmer and then addressing the problem is one thing. Feeling unable to tolerate ordinary distress without the object—or becoming extremely distressed whenever it is unavailable—is another.

Crolic likewise said that "shopping your feelings" is real but hardly new. Retail therapy has long been studied as a way consumers try to reduce negative emotions or restore a sense of well-being following stress or a loss of control.

"Many forms of consumption serve psychological needs, whether that's decorating a home, buying new clothing, attending concerts or sporting events, or traveling," Crolic said. "Cute and collectible toys are not fundamentally different."

The key, she said, is whether the behavior remains financially responsible and "enhances rather than replaces other sources of well-being." A collection that creates community is different from one that produces isolation or financial strain just like a toy that makes a difficult evening easier is different from an object expected to solve the difficulty itself.

Reimagining the Midlife Crisis

The result may look like infantilization, sure, but these toys haven't really invented midlife crisis, they just replaced its traditional props.

Previous generations were hardly famous for meeting middle age with monastic restraint. The traditional midlife crisis came along with sports cars, golf clubs, motorcycles, boats, wine collections, increasingly elaborate bicycles and watches capable of surviving ocean depths their owners will never approach.

Compared with all of that, a Squishmallow is not such a big deal. It is cheaper than a Porsche, easier to store than a boat (up to a point) and substantially less likely than a motorcycle to result in a worried phone call from your spouse.

It's also worth pointing out that the Squishmallow also does not offer an intellectual cover. Lego can claim to be engineering, while Pokémon cards can be investments and video games have become an income source for streamers. A Squishmallow is a stuffed frog, and you are a 38-year-old knowingly playing with it. It is, in its own way, a midlife crisis with the millennial stamp on it.

The difference from past generations is that millennials have a unique relationship with the performance of adulthood itself. This is the generation mocked for delaying marriage, children and homeownership, then arriving at middle age having done many of those things anyway—often later, often under harsher economic conditions and apparently without accepting every rule about which pleasures were supposed to be surrendered along the way.

As the anonymous owner of 120 Squishmallows bluntly put it: "We can't afford to buy a house or have kids anymore, so what is being an 'adult' when so many aspects of it are being financially restricted from us?"

The Millennial Toy

There is something innately and deeply millennial about the Squishmallow: it is earnest and ironic at the same time, inexpensive enough to qualify as a little treat, consumerist enough to be collectible, faintly therapeutic and sufficiently ridiculous that you can acknowledge its ridiculousness before anyone else gets the chance. A millennial toy indeed.

When our parents and grandparents went through their midlife crisis, the tradition of sorts looked like a frantic attempt to feel young again. We have stumbled upon the cheaper version of that behavior (how on brand, right?): it has tiny embroidered eyes and it is oh-so-deliciously squishy.