Never Grew Up



As you know, Growing Up Sucks. Some children, however, have found a way to halt their aging at childhood via Applied Phlebotinum or some supernatural means. Most of the time they'll have the mind, emotional maturity, and/or sensibilities of a child as well as a prepubescent body; adults in children's bodies are more likely to find it inconvenient or downright sucky, although not always.

Compare Really Seven Hundred Years Old. Not to be confused with Adult Child. When the same effect causes hardship and angst for the eternal child, it's Not Growing Up Sucks. When an attempt is made to impose this on a real-life child performer by the production team of a program he's in, it's Not Allowed to Grow Up.

Anime and Manga

 * One episode of Cowboy Bebop features a Creepy Child. Supposedly, whatever stopped his aging also made him bullet- and explosion-proof.
 * In Fate/Zero, Kiritsugu's daughter is absolutely tiny despite being eight. She's actually growing more than most homunculi of her type do but he thinks there's a 90% chance she'll stop growing before hitting puberty. In the next Grail War ten years later she's slightly older than Shirou yet is still the game's Token Mini-Moe.
 * The Trigun anime
 * And Kaori Yuki's Cain Saga manga series features an extremely sympathetically-presented member of the Evil Organization, Cassian, a middle-aged man in the body of a prepubescent boy, formerly employed as a knife-thrower in a circus. He joined the organization because they have weird, futuristic occult-medical hybrid technology in development which might give him some way to get an adult body. He's assigned to be the primary minion of a high-up member of the organization, Jizabel Disraeli, who's around twenty and  Dealt with well in that Cassian, even though all visual cues are against it, sees Disraeli as a kid.   Cassian has many levels in awesome.
 * in Cardcaptor Sakura is mostly this with a bit of Not Growing Up Sucks. He specifically chose to halt his aging, but while he looks like a child, he's mentally an adult. He doesn't have any angst over his age dissonance shown, but.

Films - Live Action

 * The imaginary friends in Drop Dead Fred are real and regardless of their appearance they are childlike in outlook and behavior. However, this film may be a subversion, in that when Lizzie finally grows into her own as an adult woman, Fred stops acting like a child and interacts with her as an adult—for the last few moments that she can see him.

Literature

 * The Trope Namer is Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Never Grew Up, which has the Lost Boys as well as Peter Pan himself.
 * The story Child of All Ages is about a child who regularly drinks a potion which keeps her young (it also lets her live for hundreds of years, so she isn't about to stop, even though there are many disadvantages to being a kid).
 * Book example no one's going to recognize: The Meq (by Steve Cash). Also a spectacular example of a non-ending.
 * There's a SF short story called "Start the Clock" that features this. Basically, one day everyone on Earth stops aging, and stays in whatever "state" they were at the time... little kids have it the best, in a way, because their brains stay in the "good at learning" state... and at the point in time the story's set, they've gotten the same rights as adults (they can hold jobs and live on their own and such). Anyone going through puberty got the worst deal, since it just keeps going, deforming them and giving them health problems. Infants tend to get cybernetics, and are scary and powerful.
 * Although by the time the story is set treatments to allow people to continue to age have been developed.
 * Oskar, the protagonist of Günter Grass's novel The Tin Drum, deliberately stunts his growth at age three, by hurling himself down the stairs, so that he can avoid being part of the horrific adult world around him. He attempts to shield himself further from adult horrors by drowining them out with his titular drum. In the end, however,.
 * Harlan Ellison's short story "Jeffty is Five" is about a kid who is always five. Not only that, but he is also seemingly an unconscious Reality Warper; he continually gets to see new movies starring actors who've been dead for years, new episodes of radio shows that have been off the air for decades, and read new issues of comics that don't exist anymore. This leads the narrating character, who's highly nostalgic for the Good Old Days, to spend a lot of time with him... until, as usually happens in an Ellison story, it all goes horribly awry.
 * of "The Age of Five" trilogy by Trudi Canavan is sort of an example of this trope. Whilst his body is that of a seven or eight year old child, he has the knowledge and maturity that he has acquired over thousands of years of life

Live Action TV

 * The first episode of Eerie, Indiana involves two identical twins called Bert and Ernie who never got older than twelve and had to repeat seventh grade for thirty years because their mother locked them inside age-retarding Tupperware each night. As they state in unison, "It's a living hell".

Video Games

 * The Kokiri from The Legend of Zelda are given life by the Great Deku Tree and automatically stop aging at around 10.
 * But as seen in Wind Waker, they can have their form changed by the Deku Tree in order to protect them (in this case, ) so the tree may have given them this attribute.
 * Seere from Drakengard. It is more apparent in the sequel which takes place eighteen years later.
 * Xenosaga:
 * Breath of Fire IV has an entire town of these; the town of Chek is entirely populated by what appear to be kids but are actually people in their teens on up to elderly people.

Web Comics

 * Philippe from Achewood also seems like he will always be five, especially if this strip is canon...

Western Animation

 * The imaginary friends from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends are real, and childlike, but never grow up, which becomes tragic when their creators grow out of them and eventually abandon them.

Real Life

 * Brooke Greenberg, who has a mysterious medical condition that has caused her mind and body to remain in infancy for 17 years and counting (with some anomalies, such as her bone age being around that of a ten-year-old). There's no obvious supernatural involvement, although her first five years or so of life were full of medical catastrophes that spontaneously resolved without leaving any damage (for example, a brain tumor that spontaneously disappeared).
 * Though given that her telomeres are shorter than a normal child her age, Brooke may actually age faster than normal - even though she doesn't grow up.