The Kids Who Identify as Animals: A rising subculture of kids says they don’t feel entirely human. Here’s what their parents are learning to do with that. (Kara Baskin, 10/14/26, Boston Magazine)
What is new is where—and how young—the search happens. The furry world these kids move through lives largely online: The International Anthropomorphic Research Project (IARP), a group of scholars who study it, finds a heavy overlap with digital media use, and nearly 60 percent of furries say they found the fandom before turning 18. It’s a place where identity is constantly performed, debated, and policed, often by other kids. Yet even for the most online generation in history, some things arrive before the algorithm. The Internet gave Sol the word for it, and others who understood. But the feeling was already there.
The fandom also overlaps heavily with other marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ and nonbinary young people—which has made it a target of moral panic. In 2022, the baseless claim that schools were installing litter boxes for students who identified as cats ricocheted across the Internet and into political speeches, sparking a new battle in the culture wars.
Furries are also routinely conflated with sexual fetish—adult furry content exists online—though that bears little resemblance to the kids sewing tails, painting masks, and trading art at PortCon. “One of the biggest misconceptions is that there’s sort of an adult undertone when really, this is about expression, identity, and creativity,” Werkhoven says. “There’s the conception that furry is strictly like a kink, and that’s not true. It’s: ‘I have a character, and that character is a dog.’”
That fear-and-fascination cycle is where most parents come in. Catherine, a Newton mother of two furry kids (now 27 and 21), found out her older child was a furry only because her younger one let it slip years ago; the older one feared the stigma too much to say so. “These furries are all anonymous. They’re in big fur suits, right? It could be anybody. I don’t know, factually, if this has ever happened, but there is fear that pedophiles will take advantage of younger kids,” she says. Then she chaperoned her younger child to a convention and found it closer to an art fair than a den of iniquity: kids and caregivers, mental health workshops, and costumes of startling craft. “They come up with a whole character. They have very elaborate stories of their character and terminology. It doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or girl, gay or straight; they become this other person, and they can open up,” she says. “I was impressed.”
Catherine’s reassurance, though, rests on something therian parents don’t have. Her children invented their “fursonas.” Sol didn’t invent the cat. The question in Susanne’s house isn’t whether this is safe—it’s what it means that her daughter isn’t pretending.
