Grown-ups are buying more toys than preschoolers — to the tune of $1 billion

Bob Friedland’s home in Little Falls, NJ, is filled with Lego. Lego flowers adorn his dining room table. A Lego reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” hangs in his office. He has 10 Lego city skylines scattered throughout his abode (one for every town he’s visited). On Halloween, he strings lights on his Lego “Nightmare Before Christmas” set and displays it at the bay window at the front of his house. 

“I had to move out of my condo and into a house to find a place to put them all,” Friedland, 50, told The Post.

Friedland has worked in the toy industry as a marketer for decades, but he only began seriously playing with Lego in 2020. 

Like many adults stuck at home during the Coronavirus pandemic that spring, Friedland found himself alone and anxious. He remembered how playing with the snappable plastic building blocks had brought him joy as a child. So he bought a 1,000-piece Lego “Voltron” set — based on the 1980s cartoon. And then bought another, and another. He’s completed at least 50 sets since, re-creating everything from a bonsai plant to the set of Jerry’s apartment on “Seinfeld.”

“They’re a stress reliever,” Friedland said. “They don’t fall apart, you can put them on a shelf and look at them and they give you fun, good memories.”

Friedland isn’t the only grown-up embracing their inner child. What started as a pandemic pastime has exploded into a phenomenon, with companies such as MGA Entertainment, Hasbro and Lego pumping out products targeted to these so-called “kidults”: miniature fake food, limited-edition Formula 1 figurines and intricate building sets.

Even schools training the next generation of toy-makers like Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles, have incorporated “kidult” products into their coursework. 

“It’s revolutionized the toy world,” said Jessica Kavanaugh, vice-president of marketing at JAKKS Pacific, which produces licensed toy products for kid-focused brand giants such as Sonic, Nintendo and Disney.

Adults now account for 28% of all global toy sales, according to analytics firm Circana — an increase of 2.5% since 2022. In 2024, grown-ups bought more toys than any other age group, including preschoolers. 

In the 12 months ending June 2024, US adults accounted for more than $7 billion in toy purchases. And while European toy sales for children had declined by $217 million between 2019 and 2022, they’d increased by about $1.1 billion for adults, per a 2023 Circana report.

The trend is also accelerating in Mexico, Brazil and South Africa. And market research group IMARC expects the Chinese kidult market to grow 9.3% annually through 2032.

Michelle Steinberg, owner of the public relations firm The deFIANT, lists model kits, clay sculpting, trading cards, painting and collecting miniatures, figurine collectables and Legos as the most popular categories for “kidults.”

“It’s about nostalgia, it’s about self-expression and it’s about social connection,” said Steinberg, whose firm represents toy-makers.

Social media has fueled the frenzy.

“It has made being a kidult cool,” said 25-year-old Sydney McKenna, a Kansas City-based micro-influencer who posts about action figures on Instagram and TikTok at @sydneymcardoso.

McKenna said that she didn’t have many friends growing up, and that she and her father bonded over their love of Transformers. She joined social media about a year ago to show off their collection of thousands of figures. She now has more than 28,000 followers on TikTok and 23,000 followers on Instagram, and launched a YouTube account in January.  

“I did one TikTok post, not thinking anything of it, and then it went super viral overnight,” said McKenna, who is married and manages a bridal shop. “People in the comments were like, ‘This is so cool. I’ve never seen anything this big before. You guys collect everything!’ I didn’t really understand before then how big the toy community was, or the kidult community or nostalgia.”

At JAKKS, Kavanaugh witnessed this frenzy firsthand. While the toy market typically doesn’t see major sales until the Q4 holiday season, last year she noticed a surge whenever a new product landed on shelves. Kavanaugh remembered the launch of a line of “The Simpsons” figurines last July as the turning point.

“That’s when I noticed that the kidult customer is actually driving our business,” she said. “I saw more sales in July than I’d ever seen before, and it was because of these grown people like my husband who have always been fans of ‘The Simpsons’ seeing them on social media and being like, ‘I need this now!’”

“Just like the best kid’s books, kid’s toys — the best of them — have something to offer for adults,” said Roy Schwartz, a pop culture historian and author of “Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero.”

Adults have long collected and cherished children’s playthings, said Schwartz: train sets, Troll dolls, Beanie Babies. Sometimes these “toys” were investments (like the original 1997 Princess Diana Beanie Baby, which can now go for hundreds of thousands of dollars on eBay). 

But often they were something that brought delight or comfort. For example, Schwartz mentioned that many Vietnam veterans collected the old 12-inch GI Joe dolls from the 1960s. “That was more to reconnect with their army days than to play,” he said.

Toys also offer an outlet for adult creativity. 

The Stettheimer Dollhouse — currently on view at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) — is one noteworthy example. Carrie Stettheimer was an aspiring theatrical designer who hosted a fashionable art salon in Manhattan with her two sisters. She spent nearly two decades, from 1916 and 1935, crafting a miniature version of the eccentric family’s mansion, featuring artworks from artist friends like Marcel Duchamp. 

“She did so much of it on her own, in terms of the stenciling and painting on the walls, the needlepointing, the little tiny Mahjong tiles in the library,” said Lilly Tuttle, curator at the MCNY. 

“It was like a colossal, multi-decade craft project, and it has that kind of meditative quality of things like Legos.”

The Lego Group started in 1932 as a small wooden-toy manufacturer. In 1958, it introduced the Lego brick we know today, a series of interlocking parts in different shapes and sizes that allow for endless building possibilities. Yet early on it appealed to adults, like architects or design-heads, who used their kids’ blocks to create the worlds of their dreams. 

In 1999, Lego began producing ambitious sets to court these older fans, beginning with a “Star Wars” X-wing fighter, and launched Lego Architecture in 2008 with a model of Chicago’s Sears Tower.

But according to Lego senior marketing director for adults Genevieve Capa Cruz, the very first products “overtly identified as made for adults” came out in 2020, with more-sophisticated black packaging and an 18+ marking. In 2024, she added, Lego launched approximately 563 sets, 13% of which were “specifically designed for adults.”

Lego debuted its Botanicals line in 2023. The sets — including floral bouquets and a bonsai tree — were inspired by gifts the company’s designers would build one another for anniversaries, birthdays and other special events. They’re now the brand’s top-selling products.

“It mixes a natural predisposition to nature and flowers with a hands-on, creative twist, where you are building and arranging these beautiful flowers,” said Capa Cruz. Plus, you don’t have to water them. “They are always in bloom, and they offer a lasting memory,” she said.

Recently, I took my 6-year-old child to visit my aunt Josefina in Sea Cliff, Long Island. I was astounded to find the dining room table had been taken over by Lego sets: a medieval castle, a “Harry Potter” village, a pirate’s ship.

“It’s my obsession,” my aunt admitted. Like Friedland in New Jersey, my aunt also got hooked during the pandemic, when she found a hockey bag filled with my (now-grown) cousin’s old Lego bricks. Now, she watches YouTube videos and lurks Facebook message boards devoted to the toy. She has introduced her 7-year-old grandson to Lego and they can spend hours building together.

“I find it therapeutic,” she added. “Even searching for pieces or sorting them is so absorbing, and if I’m stressed it is the greatest escape.”

As the mother of an only child, who constantly asks me to play with her, I’ve found pleasure and calm in those childlike escapes too. We’ve built a Lego farm together, constructed a mini vegetable garden for her dollhouse (using MGA’s Miniverse line — its most popular product among “kidults”), and spent hours dressing up my own American Girl Doll that I had as a kid.

The conclusion: We could all use a little more play in our adult lives.

“I believe that it takes maturity to retain the simplicity of childhood,” pop culture expert Schwartz said. “It’s very easy to see kidult things as just our culture becoming increasingly infantilized.” But, he added, “being an adult … is serious business, and it’s probably more serious today than ever: more complicated, more fast paced, more demanding. I think it’s more important than ever to enjoy and celebrate the things that we love.”