Inner Child - TV Tropes

"Inner reflection goes in here."

There's a character who remembers how things were for them in the past, good or bad, back when they were a child. Perhaps they have an angsty Dark and Troubled Past, or a troubled present and want to remember when things were better for them before it all went sideways. A Flashback doesn't allow for enough context when trying to illustrate the subject, and it's more visual to show them when they were young and imply their vulnerability and/or innocence.

Cue the Inner Child.

The Inner Child is a representation of a character as younger that isn't a truly physical manifestation and doesn't replace the older version. While this often involves interacting with their adult self or other people around them, the Inner Child doesn't actually exist; they're more like a mental representation of the character from before. Unlike a Flashback, the child can interact with their adult self and others — though it's almost purely mental and often occurs in the Mental World or in a dream.

The Inner Child of the self can show up for many reasons: having an Enemy Without (with Ambiguous Innocence) or the Enemy Within, a Split Personality, or showing the Helpless Good Side (if the Inner Child's age is below the Competence Zone). Perhaps they Used to Be a Sweet Kid and are now a Broken Bird, or had their Innocence Lost at a young age. Maybe circumstances of the past have made them a total Jerk but they still have a Hidden Heart of Gold that perhaps even they forgot about. Maybe it's just a character that wants to communicate with their past "self" in some way, take a Journey to the Center of the Mind, or they (or the author) wants to show the character's vulnerability or mentality as a child.

In order to qualify for this trope, the character must clearly appear as a child compared to the adult or older character, and preferably should interact with either the present-day self and/or the rest of the present-day cast in some form, even as mental abstractions themselves to show the contrast. The inner child needs to also be noticeably younger than the character's current age; so for example, a middle-aged adult can see themselves in their early teenage years, but a teenager would need to see themselves as a child.

The difference between this, Plot-Relevant Age-Up, and Fountain of Youth:

• Fountain of Youth is when an character is physically aged down from their present age regardless of the age, often by an outside force or Applied Phlebotinum (like a literal fountain) and must do something extra in order to return to their older form. Being spoken to from their adult self isn't needed and likely can't be done.
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up is when a child character is physically aged up to an adult for plot reasons; they may or may not go back to their child self. Again, being spoken to from their child self isn't needed and likely can't be done.
• Inner Child is a mental representation of the character at a younger or earlier stage of life that doesn't wholly exist. The character is not actually aged down and only is seeing or being seen mentally as a child (or being taken back to their childhood mentally). There is no need to "return" to their adulthood using more than their mental state, and they can communicate with the adult self.

A Sub-Trope variation of Split Personality. Often involves Talking to Themself.

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