Nostalgia, My Aesthetic
There was a movie that I really liked when I was growing up, called Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (Or Job's War, if your in the colonizers) And the introduction to the protagonist shows him as a member of of a group of kids on the street. Their parents weren't ever in the picture, so. it was easy to seem them as street orphans, scrambling and scrounging to get their next few hours of fun in VR.
I always liked that. No parents, but finding a family that sticks together.