Children can be better at learning than adults. Socio-psychological factors often inhibit adults in learning environments; they are afraid to make mistakes or look silly around their peers and as a result don’t engage with the material as a child would. In language learning, this becomes even more prominent, as children are less afraid of making weird sounds or mispronouncing new words, whereas older students hesitate to speak out loud. Not only are children less constrained by socio-psychological pressures, but they tend to be naturally more curious and open to new ideas when learning. They approach the task of learning, in many ways, differently than an adult would. Inner Child intends to tap into the potential benefits of changing the way we perceive ourselves by altering our body and environment in virtual reality.Inner Child is a virtual reality experience developed on the HTC Vive that embodies users in the virtual avatar of a child. The platform leverages the tracking capabilities of room-scale virtual reality to create the illusion of feeling younger, so that learners can approach learning with a more childlike mindset. Results from our user study suggest that simply having a virtual body impacts the acquisition of vocabulary in virtual reality in a positive way. Furthermore, the illusion of being younger in VR improved participants’ performance in subsequent recall tests both immediately and one week after exposure to the system, which was dependent on the type of body a participant inhabited in the virtual scenario. These results can radically change the way we learn in the classrooms of the future, suggesting that we can alter our notion of self to enhance the way we approach learning on a subconscious level.