There's a lot of discourse in the Poppy Playtime community about how and if the toys age. But I pose a different question: how do THEY perceive their ages?
I don't think they count themselves as kids anymore. Their childhood innocence and wonder has been gone for a long time and their experiences have forced them to mature quicker. There's also the fact that they aren't physically in the bodies of kids anymore.
But at the same time, they are FAR from adults. They lack the necessary experience to be considered adults and the vast majority of the experiments likely never finished middle school, let alone high school. They don't have the same education that adults often need. They've missed out on the milestone that make someone an adult in societies eyes, like have a car, getting a job, graduating, ect. They're also physically stunted because most of them were experimented on either before they started puberty or while they were in the middle of it.
So do they see themselves as their actual ages? Its likely they all know their birth year and could probably figure out their ages if they know its 2005. The very youngest an experiment could possibly be is 10 years old (and that's if they were a baby that was experimented on in 1995) while the older ones would be in their mid to late twenties, which might make it easier to differentiate between leaders in places like Safe Haven.
But still, I don't think they would feel like their "real ages". They've been mentally bashed and abused for years and they've been in survival mode for over a decade. They've essentially been stuck. They can't learn and mature in a meaningful way because all they've been focused on for so long is making it to the next day.
I think it would all depend on what's easier for them to confront; the fact that they're practically adults without essential skills or that they will never get to be adults and will forever be stuck in this weird limbo between adulthood and childhood.
And if they did somehow escape the factory, what would they even do? Its a kind of what-if scenario of them somehow getting their old bodies back. Would they just pick up where they left off in terms of development, are they stuck mentally, are they adults trapped in the bodies of kids? How do you even come back from something like human experimentation?
Weather they do think they age or don't think they age, I don't think they'll ever really be able to see themselves one way or the other. Maybe they just age much slower now, like a sort of stunted development or if they're permenately stuck at the age they were turned, they do make me wonder;
If you grow up, but no ones there to see it, did you ever really grow up?