The most common form of age play for adults is taking pleasure in being treated as a younger person. Less often, someone takes pleasure in treating others as if they were younger, and occasionally someone prefers to play at being older than he is. For a substantial proportion of adults who enjoy it, age play is also an erotic experience. Although age play is generally distinct from BDSM and transgender experiences, it may overlap with either or both, and age players – sometimes known as “adult babies” or “AB’s” – may find a general sort of companionship among people who engage in other specialized consensual sex and gender explorations.

Perhaps because the general population of age players is quite small, it is also a population frequently misunderstood and maligned for what outsiders see as their sexual fetish, even in those instances when age play is neither sexual nor a fetish. For many AB’s, for example, whether it is erotic or not, age play can be a strategy to assuage anxiety without resorting to medication. It can also be a useful tool for bringing unresolved issues from the past into awareness, where they can be treated and healed.

Age play often does seem to be a way to respond to traumatic events that took place in early childhood, but by themselves the activities are often pleasurable to participants and harmless to anyone. Yet, the practice is so misunderstood and abjured that people who engage in it often have to contend with shame, guilt, and the anger and fear of their loved ones, as well as their own underlying concerns.

Age play is explicitly a practice that involves consenting adults. It is not pedophilia, which is illegal and involves chronological children, and so by definition cannot be a consenting adult activity.