"to infantilize"

I was saying to someone earlier today that I found some aspect of school to be "infantilizing"--or someone was saying this to me--and I stopped to think how much I love this word. As a transitive verb, it just means "To reduce to an infantile state or condition" or "to condescend to as if still to a young child". What neither of these definitions capture is the long transitive form, that infantilization is not accomplished at the flick of a switch, and even more subtly, that infantilization is not a simple transitive at all. The infantilization must be taken on by the subject.

Like Foucault's sense of discipline and surveillance, where the object of knowledge learns to discipline ITSELF, infantilization is something you perform on yourself on behalf of an outside subject. So, "I abuse you" is different from "I make you feel worthless," but both of these forms of transitivity (the active v. the assumed) are captured in the splendid to infantilize. One assumes one's own infantilization.

Other verbs like this would be like, to subordinate, to convert, etc.