At last year’s CES, I was introduced to Snoo, a bassinet that rocks to lull a crying baby back to sleep. The product was featured in the Baby Tech showroom, a space littered with smart baby monitors and high-tech breast pumps. This year I didn’t see Snoo, but I saw its descendant: the Rocking Bed. Like Snoo, the Rocking Bed, well, rocks. It’s a mechanized frame that holds a mattress, gently swaying back and forth, coercing someone into sleep. Except it’s for adults.
The Rocking Bed, which retails for $2,950, is part of what The Ringer coined in a recent internal group chat as the “adult baby market.” This industry includes peer-to-peer, gig-economy apps like Uber, Postmates, and Taskrabbit. It also includes the communal living movement, which, replete with on-site tech support, obviates the complications of home management.
A significant part of the adult baby industry is focused on sleep. At CES earlier this month, I also encountered Somnox, a “sleep robot.” The device is the result of a Kickstarter campaign that exceeded its goal by 200 percent. It’s a small pillow shaped so that it’s easy to spoon, but weighted a bit heavier than traditional head pillows. It has a soothing “heartbeat,” and it gently vibrates. It can play audio like white noise or ocean sounds, and it glows, like an adult version of glow worm dolls. It costs $618, and it will begin shipping to customers in late 2018.
“I want to introduce you to the world’s first sleeping robot,” an ironically sleepy-looking brand rep told me at CES. It was Day 3 of the show, and we were standing at a booth under fluorescent lights amid the cacophonous chaos of hundreds of simultaneous demos. “Here, hold it for a minute. What’s your first reaction?”
“It’s heavier than I thought it would be,” I told him.
“We made it that way because, through our user testing, we found that people prefer something heavier because they feel a little bit more love for the robot,” he said. “It’s more similar to a partner or a cat, so you actually feel it. Put your hand right here, and spoon it like you would spoon … anyone.”
I awkwardly cupped the robot to my body, feeling a little silly, like I was clutching a doll. “Very slowly, feel that breathing in and breathing out,” he said. “That breathing mechanism is actually based on a technique …” he trailed off as people swarmed the booth and the noise level increased “… we implemented in the robot, and it’s proven to make you feel more relaxed, calmer, and to fall asleep faster.”
A rocking bed and a soothing pillow sound like what I would see in a promoted Instagram post and screenshot as items I’d aspire to own. In fact, this is how I came to own a weighted blanket, making me a bit of an adult baby. Consider all of these products together and you’d be right to worry about a tech-induced Peter Pan complex. Technology has a tendency to infantilize. Whether it’s on-demand apps that take care of basic adult chores or it’s various pieces of hardware, like the Instant Pot, that streamline labor-intensive tasks, commonplace products are redefining what it means to be a grown-up. Consumers can now bypass many of the more tedious, granular parts of adulthood. The new communal living model and the gig economy have made life easier and more convenient; the Rocking Bed, on the other hand, is something a baby would — and does — use.
In the Venn diagram of new products that make life easier in arguably unnecessary ways, the adult baby market circle overlaps with the circle of high-tech pampering tools. O’2Nails is an acrylic nail printer, and the FoldiMate — one of the most popular products at CES — is a machine that folds your clothes for you. It allows adults to eschew a boring grown-up chore. Flying cars may not exist, and we haven’t figured out how to decrease our carbon footprint en masse, but these technologies are ridding us of boring grown-up tasks (with varying degrees of success).
The adult baby market offers a lifestyle that resembles notions of a distant-future adulthood that TV shows like The Jetsons introduced. But moreover, these products treat adults like teens, who are often the prized consumer for most brands. “We not only infantilize our teens … but we also idolize our teens and we emulate our teens,” said Robert Epstein, a psychologist and researcher who has written books about teens and adult maturation. “Basically, we’re showing in major ways that we don’t want to grow up. This wasn’t that common years ago, but it’s becoming more common now. We not only don’t want to grow up, grow old, and die, we want to be young, period.”
Methods and devices to evade death and aging are popular in the tech, science, and wellness markets. “When you know there’s a market, products will emerge, and that’s what you’re seeing. As many as you saw this year at CES, I predict you’ll see more next year. Wherever there’s a market, products follow,” Epstein said of any category that makes us feel younger.
Aside from allowing consumers to pursue an extended youth, the adult baby market is thriving because of the escape that the products offer. Perhaps one of the most obvious retreats to childhood is the craze for adult coloring books and related apps. According to a recent study, the trend is tied to the need for stress relief. Researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand tested whether using adult coloring books could improve our psychological state. “Coloring participants showed significantly lower levels of depressive symptoms and anxiety after the intervention, but control participants did not,” the study read. According to a recent exploration of the trend by Digiday, big brands are jumping into the coloring-book world by creating their own apps or working with coloring-book app developers to target adults. According to the Digiday report, coloring apps for adults are some of the most popular free and paid-for apps in the iOS and Android app stores.
The pervasiveness of the adult baby market is further evident in the popularity of new experiences for sale: sleepaway camps for grown-ups, Instagram playgrounds disguised as museums, and adult bounce houses. Interest in “grown-up play days” is climbing, according to the trend-casting agency Foresight Factory. “We expect adult interest in engaging activities typically associated with children’s leisure to continue,” the agency wrote in a short report.
And, of course, since we’re recommitting ourselves to the playground, we’re prepared to dress appropriately. Annie Betz, a senior account executive for the startup-focused PR firm LaunchSquad, explained that “athleisure wear, and professional, yet comfortable clothing — like dress yoga pants and fashionable sneakers — provide a simplicity that adults have since abandoned from childhood,” she told me in an email. “School kids will go from the classroom to recess to art class to a playdate in clothing that is versatile enough to fit all of those activities.” We were supposed to have to give that up, as a rule of being a grown-up. But that concept is being rewritten by athleisure, “[which] brings back some of that childhood simplicity,” Betz said.
While wandering around CES, I often thought to myself, “What’s the most blatantly childish thing I’m going to see here?” There were a few “mind-training” systems designed to relax users with brain exercises, which felt sort of like indoor recess, and a pair of Bluetooth sunglasses that played music into people’s ears, something that 13-year-old me would have died for. I finally found the winner: Toto’s “zero dimension” bathtub, which tries to deliver the feeling of zero gravity. The tub mimics those flotation sensory-deprivation tanks, which, as has often been pointed out, in turn mimic what it’s like to be in your mother’s womb. The cost of the high-tech tub has yet to be released, but Kohler’s self-flushing toilet at CES was more than $6,000, so expect it to be costly. It looks wonderful, and I would gladly sink into it.
It’s unclear whether adults are steering the booming infantilizing market or whether it’s steering the habits of adults. While real-life products like the Rocking Bed and experiences like the Museum of Ice Cream aren’t necessarily concerning, Epstein said he worries about what implications these preferences could have for our future. “Looking ahead, we’re looking at a near future where people are going to retreat more and more into fantasy worlds aided by VR technology.” He points to the hikikomori phenomenon in Japan, in which grown (usually) men become dramatically antisocial and live in their parents’ homes, in part because of their intense addiction to gaming.
Epstein’s vision is the most Black Mirror–esque, but it’s hard to deny that there’s a joy in comforting ourselves. I asked Mark Russell, the creator of the Rocking Bed, whether he’d considered making an app to accompany the bed; after all, software that can reinforce a business owner’s desired behaviors and tie consumers to a hardware product is a smart play. “I think I’ll steer away from it,” he said. “Here’s the thing, and especially here — this is like, such a … a tech-lusty place, you know? Everyone wants an app and sensors. But it’s a bed that rocks.” When I tried it, the simplicity placated any concerns I might have had about being an adult baby, one who’s increasingly pulled into an imaginary world where apps and sensors are reengineering my maturation-resistant brain. But maybe pacifying me is all part of the plan.