What is a little? According to many plurans a little is simply a member under the internal age of 13. I think that’s a vast oversimplification and entirely unhelpful for cases with complex internal age situations or functions.
So.. how do I define Littlehood? I don’t, not exactly. Littlehood is a spectrum of multiple common traits and no two littles are the same nor do they necessarily need the same things. What are the quasi-defining traits of Littlehood? I have seen three main ones, Youthfullness, otherwise referred to as a childlike manor, Disability, and a little something I call Childhood Temporal Orientation.
What is Childhood Temporal Orientation? Here’s a better question, what’s Temporal Orientation? Temporal Orientation is the time period you think of your own and/or are mentally stuck in. Most hosts and singlets are temporally oriented to the present.
A lot of trauma-holding littles are temporally oriented to their body’s childhood, like for example, our sexual littles tend to be or appear 8-12 because that’s when we went through our first puberty as well as a sexual assault. They also think in similar ways as we collectively did at those ages. How is being temporally oriented to the past different from a flashback? I don’t know. It’s nice having a word to describe being stuck at a certain point of time without having that word imply that I’m in trauma hell though.
The next thing, Youthfullness and/or a Childlike manner, is pretty self explanatory. Do you act like a child? Are you immature? Do you look like a child?
Disability isn’t something many people think of when they think about littlehood, but I think it’s a defining feature of it. The stereotypical little is the one that needs medium to high support to meet their needs, and many littles in general are disabled by their littlehood. Our own littles have increased cluster B and autism symptoms.
For a while we considered littlehood to be a form of disability in of itself. This isn’t still our stance, but the fact remains that the littlehood spectrum and mental disability are inherently intertwined. And for good reason! The concept of adulthood [in the west at least] is defined by a lack of disability and dependance. So of course the opposite is seen as “childlike” and childlike adult bodies are seen as disabled, regardless of if they are or not.
So in the end the Littlehood spectrum is defined by three main sliders, only one of which relates to internal appearance.
