Won’t somebody please think of the children? Well, if you spend any time in the metaverse, you won’t really have much of a choice.

Pop into a VR realm like Meta’s Horizon Worlds for even a moment, and an army of kids in their digital avatars will swarm all around you almost everywhere you go—waving, laughing, jumping, tossing digital objects, and shouting everything from high-pitched shrieks to straight up racial slurs.

That’s right, the metaverse is alive and, well … it’s populated primarily by children.

This won’t be a surprise to anyone who frequents social spaces online. Game platforms like Roblox and Fortnite are very popular with kids. Play a round of Call of Duty multiplayer and it might seem like every other voice you hear is a foul-mouthed kiddo with a gun. In a world full of digital natives, the young—abundant in neuroplasticity and free time—are usually the first to embrace nascent technologies. They pilot their avatars with microphones turned on by default, and it doesn’t take long for the interactions to start to feel like a brightly colored Lord of the Flies.

This cultural shift is only growing more acute as the prices of VR headsets continue to drop, making them more accessible to more families, and as the big platforms build out new content tiers to appeal to younger and younger audiences.

Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, says that for a long time, people have worried about how VR affects kids. Usually, they’re worried about the prospect of adults harassing kids. That is a valid concern, of course, and still a very real problem. But in some ways, that dynamic has flipped.

“I’m not trying to minimize that as a concern, but anyone that goes to any of these platforms will quickly find that adults are going to get surrounded by a bunch of kids,” Bailenson says. “It’s interesting to see the directional arrow of what we were worried about actually going the other way, which is kids are just waiting for someone to throw balls at, to hit with baseball bats, to say bad words to. It’s kind of the opposite of what a lot of people were worried about.”

The Kids Have Taken Over the Classroom

In many ways, this adolescent free-for-all in Horizon Worlds is a level up for the platform. In the early days after Horizon was created in 2021 and broadly promoted by Meta as a virtual space for everybody, it felt empty. Lifeless. But while adults may view Horizon as a ho-hum digital simulacrum of the world fashioned by corporate sensibilities, kids have started to see it as an open wilderness ripe for exploring.

As a virtual world, Horizon still isn’t as popular as stalwarts like Roblox or Fortnite. (It probably won’t ever be.) But it has started to feel more active—sometimes even crowded. People in the guise of their avatars wander between rooms, compete in games, pretend to work at fast food restaurants, and, yes, shout at each other quite a lot. The platform has come a long way, even if its community, and therefore culture, is now dominated by lots of very loud preteens.

There are a few reasons kids have navigated to Horizon Worlds in droves. Part of it is changing age restrictions. In April 2023, Meta opened Horizon Worlds to users ages 13 and older in the US and Canada. In June of 2024, it expanded 13-and-up access to every country where Quest headsets are sold. Then in August 2024, it lowered the age gate to 10 for US and Canadian preteens. Horizon Worlds is also available on mobile and desktop browsers, so many rooms are not exclusive to VR. No matter how the kids are logging in, they’re flooding through the doors all the same.

Tanner Higgin, a researcher at the education nonprofit WestEd who focuses on video games and education tech, says Meta’s move to lower the age gate makes sense for a platform that has been embraced more and more by young users. The medium itself also seems especially enticing for kids.

“VR matches with the kind of mad capped, surrealistic nature of kids’ media,” Higgin says. “Kids have such a higher tolerance for the bizarre, cacophonous mess that VR can be that it matches almost with their sensibilities in a way it doesn’t with adults.”

Leo Gebbie, an analyst at the firm CCS Insights who covers augmented and virtual reality, says that the progressive affordability of hardware might be helping too. The Meta Quest 3S, Meta’s new budget-friendly VR headset, has the potential to bring even more kids into the medium. The device only costs $300, which is about the cheapest way to get into VR right now. That low price is likely to appeal to many VR newcomers, including parents with young kids who haven’t felt like they could justify VR’s cost of entry until now.

“For the affordable Quest headset specifically, I think that they’ve kind of mirrored the adoption and usage journey of things like the Nintendo Wii,” Gebbie says. “That kind of affordable gadget that you buy as a family thing that you give to your kids.”

Horizon still has adult fans, and in their eyes, the kids are not alright. You can find thread after thread on Reddit of people complaining about children ruining the vibes of virtual spaces like VR chat. Or hear horror stories about kids getting into sketchy situations—being exposed to bullying or harassment by other kids or, more worryingly, adults.

Higgin says this friction is typical of social spaces that include a wide range of age groups, as kids just have a different way of relating and interacting with the world than adults do. “And in these spaces, that makes it hard for any adult to tolerate,” he says. “The whole crowding around, and everyone talking at once, and just shouting memes. Meta might not have a choice here. It might be the first, like, takeover by kids of a virtual digital space that I can think of.”

In 2018, Bailenson coauthored a report with the children’s advocacy organization Common Sense Media that offers advice to parents who have concerns about what their kids experience in VR. It encourages keeping VR use sessions short, utilizing parental content controls, and, most importantly, participating or at least keeping an eye on what their kid is getting up to in their virtual world.

“They’re anonymous, their parents can’t see what they’re doing like they can on a normal TV or video game, and there’s no physical consequences their actions might bring them in the real world,” says Bailenson. “That trifecta is what’s enabling a lot of this behavior.”

Playground Rules

Really though, the kids are doing kid things. Running around, playing with bubble guns and interactive objects, chatting with friends and making new ones. Many of the kids in Horizon Worlds are friendly, and they run right up to other users to wave or say hi. In offshoot rooms, they play games like tag or floor-is-lava. Lots of areas in the shared Horizon rooms just feels like a playground, reverberating with laughter, yelling, and the occasional shrieks of adolescent anger. Kid stuff!

But the metaverse also has an underbelly. Spend enough time cruising around in Horizon, and while it may look like a cartoon wonderland, you’re bound to see the seedy side of humanity emerge. And experts have criticized the platform and Meta’s sometimes allegedly lax approach to policing its virtual spaces. After all, the company doesn’t have a great track record of protecting kids on Facebook or their privacy. Nor is Meta all that interested in cultivating its own transparency.

I go into Horizon World’s Music Valley room, a concert venue where people can mingle and watch a streaming live-action concert on the digital stage, and overhear a conversation between two people. They’re chatting about the concert, when suddenly the man closest to me balks at something. It is an invite to a private room sent from a different user. The woman behind the avatar next to him asks what the problem is. He says the invitation he just received came from a 16-year-old user who had been previously banned from the platform for reaching out to older men. The person he’s chatting with asks if he is going to respond to the invite.

“I’m not getting involved in that,” he says through his avatar.

Later that same day, I watch an avatar whose voice sounds like a young kid get ganged up on by other users. His avatar looks white, but he says he is Black in real life and just didn’t want to spend a bunch of time with Horizon’s character creator before diving into the world. Someone else says they don’t believe him, and others join in on the teasing. He tells the people around him that he gets harassed for his race in real life too, and says he has had to move schools because other students were bullying him. The crowd in Horizon responded by voting to kick him out of the room.

“The number one challenge is the incredible span of ages with a technology that has a pretty significant embodied presence with gestural interaction, voice, and then just the content that’s all across the board,” Higgin says. “That is kind of extraordinary and disturbing.”

Higgin says that like physical products, online services designed specifically for kids should be built for kids from the ground up. He cites services like Club Penguin—which require a parent or guardian’s permission to log in—as examples of services that have had kid-focused priorities from jump, as opposed to Horizon Worlds, which has only recently officially opened up its world to preteens.

“It seems very challenging to do that in reverse,” Higgin says.

But even services that focus on kids can run into problems. Just this week, Roblox announced that in response to accusations of child abuse on its platform, it will start restricting younger users (age 13 and under) from social hangout spaces that have not been monitored or rated for the content. It’s basically the opposite of what Meta is doing by flinging open Horizon’s doors to everyone.

It’s Not Just a Phase, Mom

These might all feel like growing pains for Horizon Worlds. The big question for the virtual social space and others like it is whether it can gracefully mature, or whether the kids will rule the kingdom.

“That’s the real catch-22 for Meta right now, or anyone developing these kinds of social experiences,” Gebbie says. “If you’re curious and you go in and try it, you probably come away thinking, ‘Oh, God, it’s full of screaming children. That’s not for me.’ That’s a very fundamental problem with the network effects here. You’re just in this position where it doesn’t feel like it’s delivering a good user experience for anyone.”

Meta has certainly tried to entice users from a variety of age groups, and implement precautions to keep users safe. When asked for comment for this story, a Meta spokesperson pointed me to the company’s Family Center resources that provide management and parental supervision tools for underage users. These include setting time limits on usage and a feature that blurs incoming chats from people your child doesn’t know. Meta also employs community guides to monitor and moderate areas like its Horizon Central room, which is the first space users are pointed to when they log into Horizon Worlds. If someone is behaving badly, a moderator can kick them out of the room, or other users can vote to have them booted.

Horizon Words also has a variety of spaces, both official and user created, that are geared more toward adults. There are comedy clubs and Great Gatsby–themed cafés that aim to entice and cultivate an older crowd. That can lead to some weird overlapping, like when a Halloween-themed gory horror film directed by Eli Roth played in a theater room a jump or two away from Horizon Central. I stood there with several other avatars—whose voices sounded like kids—and we all watched some unexpecting trick-or-treaters getting bloodily dismembered onscreen.

Hand-wringing aside, it’s important to note that people have been upset about technology’s impact on kids’ psyches since technology has existed, whether it be fretting about violent video games, or television rotting kid’s brains. But there are also ways VR can be more amiable.

I met a younger user in Horizon Central on election night who turned to me at one point and said, “Want to see the northern lights?” I obliged, and they sent me an invite to another room. I joined, and then we were teleported to a much quieter space, surrounded by a pixelated—but beautiful—recreation of the aurora borealis. We stayed there for a while, just silently looking at the sky. Then we left, and I wound up back in Horizon Central. It was a pleasant, grounding moment amidst a very chaotic night that I wouldn’t have had if it wasn’t for VR and the friendly person who wanted to show me around.

Sara Konrath, social psychology researcher at Indiana University who coauthored a report about how VR affects empathy and charitable giving, prefers to look at VR as a tool for connection rather than as a replacement for real-life social interaction.

“If someone’s spending all day on it, of course it’s a problem because they’re displacing other things then,” Konrath says. “But these kids are socializing. They’re hanging out with each other, and I’m glad they’re connected in some way. A lot of kids are, you know, they’re not in person. They’re not spending as much time as they used to face to face. And I know we like to blame technology, but what if technology is not the cause, but sort of the response?”

Higgin compares the idea of kids in VR to the concept of “the woods,” a wild, untamed space outside of the normal structures of life where kids felt like they could go and make their own rules and embrace their creativity.

“The thing about ‘the woods’ is there was this creative energy,” Higgin says. “You build structures, do various kinds of activities. For kids in a world in which maybe those spaces are kind of slowly disappearing or eroding, or childhood is changing, where it’s feeling like childhood is spent so much more indoors and digitally, maybe VR has that same potentiality to it.”