AIBU to find it weird when adult friend acts like a baby?

[Puzzled47]

I will preface this to say this is one of my oldest friends and I love her to bits, she is kind, thoughtful, we have great fun etc.

However, she has a habit of acting like a baby a lot of the time and it genuinely baffles me! She's always done it to some extent but I'm sure she's got worse in the last year or so. We are both early 30s btw.

Examples include:
Regularly talking in an actual baby voice (no human under the age of 30 around) and using phrases like "would you like some more winey winey?"
Calls her parents mumma and dadda, never mum and dad etc
Refers to a shower as a "joosh joosh" (wtf?!)
Calls her husband all sorts of really cringy pet names (in public) in a baby voice like "sausage boo" and "bubba".
She sometimes physically acts quite childlike too, it's hard to explain but things like holding a mug of tea, or a glass of water, she holds it with both hands and tips it up to sip with her arms tucked tight to her body (she has no physical disability before anyone suggests that).

It's odd as she is physically extremely petite and quite underweight and has mentioned before how she feels insecure at not having a womanly figure. So I find it odd that she chooses to act like a child if this is one of her insecurities?

Maybe I'm just a massive bitch but this is weird behaviour for a grown adult right?

YABU - this is perfectly normal, I wouldn't bat an eyelid at this behaviour
YANBU - no, weird

@babytalker123

Name changed for this. I do this, I've never really understood why and it's not done consciously. I understand why people find it weird, because I weird myself out by it too. I come from an abusive home, I think I probably have complex PTSD. I think it's a kind of arrested development as others have said. In my home it was never safe to assert myself, have opinions, confront, I was dodging violence and my parents moods all the time. I think until a few years ago I was really lost, if you'd have asked me my opinion on many things I wouldn't have been able to answer, didn't even know what my own feelings were because I wasn't allowed to voice any. I think this baby voice for me is a way of tapping into a childlike state at the only age when I was allowed to have my own feelings, as a very small child. After a certain age I would have been punished or ridiculed, I basically wasn't allowed to be a child and explore interests, experience joy over small things, have hobbies etc. these things would always be used against me in some way. For me, I think it's a way of being a child who is allowed to do those things for a moment, kind of like playing catch up over expressing emotions that I was never allowed to express. For example, I might get really excited about seeing a rabbit out in the wild or something, in the same way a child would. I would only talk like this with boyfriends, I don't think anyone else heard me. I think I would talk to them in that way because I wanted to feel like I was safe with them, and thinking about it now, they were fulfilling some sort of parent substitute role (even though they were abusive shits, some of them). There may of course be other reasons with your friend, I just thought I'd share my perspective.

I want to give you a hug after reading that, quite frankly. I always wondered if Michael Jackson had something similar going on - he never had a proper childhood, so he acted like a child when he was an adult with loads of money. He kind of regressed.

@mathanxiety. I had to read your post twice. I grew up in a home exactly like this. Fortunately it has not led to me using a baby voice! You describe precisely what I was trying to convey to my sister recently but couldn't quite find the right words. It was a toxic environment to be in and took me many years to realise this was not normal behaviour. Even today my father (who ironically has 3 daughters) believes the male species to be far superior and the misogyny very evident. Takes a lot of effort to be around..