How to Use infantilize in a Sentence

infantilize

verb
  • Both are fussed over by family members with a tendency to infantilize them.
    — Peter Debruge, Variety, 8 Sep. 2023
  • Its stance towards the parents is strangely infantilizing, echoing the way a preschool teacher speaks to her charges.
    — Erica Stern june 9, Literary Hub, 9 June 2025
  • Jokes aside, fans have interpreted this lyric as a critique of predatory men who infantilize women.
    — Alyssa Bailey, ELLE, 20 Oct. 2022
  • In other offspring news, the president managed to degrade and infantilize what is by all accounts his favorite child.
    — Lynn Yaeger, Vogue, 10 Sep. 2017
  • But the way universities infantilize students isn't just ridiculous.
    — Matt Robison, Newsweek, 21 Nov. 2024
  • The church also tends to misunderstand, infantilize and even demonize those who question.
    — The Salt Lake Tribune, 18 Aug. 2022
  • The ash barrels lining the street and the ramshackle buildings and the friendly visitors to the poor dominate and infantilize them.
    — Longreads, 20 July 2019
  • There is a certain anime cast to his round face and thick eyelashes, which perhaps are ripe for infantilizing caricature.
    — Jessica Winter, The New Yorker, 19 Mar. 2025
  • Not allowing the media to infantilize women when reporting on women’s health by skewing the risk data.
    — Emily Cegielski, Flow Space, 18 Dec. 2025
  • And while Love on the Spectrum has a diverse cast, some experts say the series’ focus on family distress can infantilize the cast.
    — Kalia Richardson, Rolling Stone, 24 Feb. 2024
  • Businesses must respect the aging consumer—not infantilize them, ignore them or caricature them.
    — Lara Devgan, Forbes.com, 1 July 2025
  • Parents said their children should be able to contact them directly during free periods, while students described the all-day ban as unfair and infantilizing.
    — Natasha Singer, New York Times, 31 Oct. 2023
  • To say anything else, many feminists now argue, would be to infantilize her, to subordinate her—to the state, to moralism—rather than acknowledge her mastery of her own body.
    — S. C. Cornell, New Yorker, 5 Jan. 2026
  • Even when both people involved are above the age of consent, even decades removed from age 18, the younger person is often infantilized and the older of the pair is deemed predatory.
    — Alex Abad-Santos, Vox, 10 Jan. 2025
  • Yet both Chozick and Alter refer to Clinton by her first name alone — a practice long used to dismiss and infantilize the person being named.
    — New York Times, 18 May 2018
  • The user is coddled by the machine, voluntarily infantilized.
    — Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker, 20 Nov. 2024
  • Meg is ostensibly supportive but treats Ryan with infantilizing kids’ gloves and excludes him subtly, forcing him to stay in a remote guest house away from the rest of the party.
    — Wilson Chapman, IndieWire, 12 Mar. 2025
  • To her, Murrill was both calling her a liar and infantilizing her, acting as if she’d been brainwashed into supporting the Harris campaign.
    — Stephanie McNeal, Glamour, 3 Oct. 2024
  • The childishness of his expressions infantilized a genuinely vicious regime, painting it as more peevish than petrifying.
    — Fintan O’Toole, The New York Review of Books, 9 Apr. 2026
  • Yet Kukla’s bright, clean and rather infantilizing style is somehow incommensurate with the dark immensities of their subject.
    — Book Marks august 21, Literary Hub, 21 Aug. 2025
  • Perhaps the infantilizing rhetoric Democrats regularly use towards Black people can provide a clue as to why those voters have started to move away from the party.
    — Matt Robison, Newsweek, 21 Nov. 2024
  • The most infantilizing elements of Obama-era youth culture were natural outgrowths of the childlike whimsy of aughts hipsterdom.
    — Nate Jones, Vulture, 20 Aug. 2024
  • But there is a way young women are spoken to by some members of the medical establishment that ranges from patronizing and infantilizing to downright dismissive and dangerous.
    — Kelly Lawler, USA TODAY, 6 Feb. 2025
  • These kitschy activities infantilize what ought to be a rigorous pursuit of professional competency.
    — Daniel Buck, WSJ, 19 Aug. 2022
  • But that's simultaneously infantilizing adult audiences and leaving kids out.
    — Kelly Lawler, USA TODAY, 19 Apr. 2023
  • Of course, the United States could do none of these things and instead continue on its present track, wasting resources and earning the enmity of some states and peoples while infantilizing others.
    — Barry R. Posen, Foreign Affairs, 1 Jan. 2013
  • Instead, the modern era is full of clichéd memes of wise owls and adorable otters superimposed with slogans that infantilize or spread misinformation about actual animal behavior.
    — Jeff Vandermeer, The Atlantic, 9 May 2017
  • The show’s turn to militarized warfare is more jarring than most TV and film gunfights, perhaps because of how the games deliberately infantilize players.
    — Proma Khosla, IndieWire, 27 Dec. 2024
  • Facets of girlboss culture (something that, with its infantilizing name did seem doomed) continue to come under scrutiny and the widespread hustle harder mentality, questioned.
    — Fiorella Valdesolo, Vogue, 16 Apr. 2024
  • In other words, one of the two travelers was seen as a human being with rights to live freely and make their own decisions, to be treated with dignity and care; the other was either infantilized at best or completely dehumanized.
    — Nuri Kino, MSNBC Newsweek, 19 June 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'infantilize.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: