Playfully adult

Bruce Levine is a 41-year-old Fairfax lawyer who has superhero figurines among the files on his desk. Juliann Andreen, 49, is a legislative assistant to Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican. On weekends, she often can be found swooshing down a ramp at a skateboard park.

Author Christopher Noxon knows just how Mr. Levine and Ms. Andreen feel. Mr. Noxon, 37, met his wife playing in an adult kickball league. Last year, he looked at his life — complete with three children and a minivan — but didn’t feel like a “grown-up.”

Turns out, a lot of adults feel the same way. Mr. Noxon recently wrote a book, “Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up,” chronicling how all things young are fun again.

Consider:

mMore than 1,000 adults play in the D.C. Kickball League — just one of several leagues around town.

The Cartoon Network has bigger ratings among viewers ages 18 to 34 than CNN.

The Entertainment Software Association says the average age of video game players is 29, up from 18 in 1990.

Half of the 200,000 daily visitors to Walt Disney World are adults traveling without children.

Cereality, a chain of three restaurants with only breakfast cereal on the menu (slogan: “Where it is always Saturday morning”), is about to be franchised nationwide.

It would be too easy to criticize adults spending time on childish pursuits as frivolous or immature. Of course, there are creepy extremes — in fiction, “The 40 Year-Old Virgin”; in reality, pop star Michael Jackson.

However, the majority of adults eating cotton candy or wearing SpongeBob socks do, indeed, spend most of their days being extremely adultlike. Being a “rejuvenile” is not an all-or-nothing situation.

“We’re all doing grown-up stuff we have to do,” says Mr. Noxon, who lives in Los Angeles. “But [kid’s stuff] can take you back to a part of your childhood you enjoyed. Some of those things are silly, but they are also a lot of fun. Going back to that wondrous place can be useful in an adult world.”

Rejuvenile pursuits have gained steam over the last decade or so, in part because our definition of adult has changed somewhat, says Jeffrey Arnett, professor of developmental psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts and author of the book “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties.”

A generation or two ago, adulthood was marked more by events such as marriage, graduation or military service. Now, the line is a little more fuzzy — as well as movable.

“Over the last half-century, people are becoming adults later,” Mr. Arnett says. “Emerging adults are not in a great hurry to reach adulthood. Sure, there is stability and money there, but it also looks boring.”

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