How infantilization ruines self-confidence and esteem

For anyone who has faced being constantly talked to like a kid over the years, I'm sure you'll agree. By constantly treating an emotionally vulnerable teenager like a child, they will start to become more juvenile in their personality and, by extension, their interests, as they enter adulthood. If someone is being constantly talked to like that, with little to 'respectful' interaction from peers from the outside, the only possible reason for why that could be is because they are childlike, and so maybe there's no point in fighting it anyway!

More and more they feel inferior to others with greater life experience and more mature interpersonal attachments, their self-confidence diminishes rapidly, and eventually their worth declines too.

infantilization is abuse.