If you have a child of certain age, it’s likely that you have come across the game Roblox at least once in the past few months.
Parents might be forgiven for thinking that a platform that advertises itself as the “imagination platform” would be reasonably safe for their child to navigate.
It makes it sound like a welcoming place, but a new study from CybersafeKids shows that children are encountering harmful content online that upsets or bothers them, and for primary schoolchildren, Roblox is one of the most common places they are coming across it.
A closer look at Roblox shows why. Originally intended to allow children to tap into their own creativity by building their own virtual worlds, it is not always as wholesome as it sounds.
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In among the dress-up games and the pet simulators is darker content that you wouldn’t want to give your child unfettered access to.
Zombie hordes seem mild in comparison to some of the material they can encounter if you don’t keep a close eye on what – and who – they are interacting with.
So what can parents do? There are two ways to approach this. The first – and most severe – is to delete the app from every device your child can access, and steer them towards Minecraft instead.
The second is to implement some of the parental controls that Roblox has in place.
By default, Roblox restricts content and features according to the date of birth you use when you set up the account. If you set up an account for your child, you will be prompted to add a parent email so you can set a parent PIN for content controls and prevent any changes from being made.
Once that is set up, you are ready to go.
The first thing is to set age controls, which you will find under My Settings > Parental Controls.
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Roblox categorises content in several categories: all ages, which is self explanatory; 9+, which is classed as suitable for those aged nine and over; 13+, for older children; and 17+ for access to more adult themed content – according to Roblox that includes intense violence, heavy realistic blood or gore, romantic themes, presence of alcohol, moderate crude humour and unplayable gambling. To access that though, you will need to provide proof of your age via a government issued ID.
The second place to go is Privacy Settings. This section will allow you to enable or disable certain features for Roblox, such as communication between players.
If you want to block out everything and restrict gameplay to experiences that are suitable for all ages only, you can enable account restrictions at the top of the page and take care of it in one fell swoop.
But there s the ability to block some features while keeping others.
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Under the Communication section, you can restrict direct messages to friends only, or disable it altogether, ensuring that no one can send your child unsolicited messages.
You can also restrict in-game or experience chats. Unfortunately, this is a little cruder, in that you can only chat with everyone or no one; there is no option to set it to friends only.
You can also disable the voice chats feature – recommended – and restrict who can see your activity or add you to their personal servers.
Another setting to pay attention to is in-app purchases. You can limit how much your child can spend each month in virtual currency on the platform (zero Robux is a good starting point, unless you want to find yourself emptying money into the Roblox coffers every week).
Even with all those protections enabled though, it is a good idea to keep a close eye on what your child is up to online. What is classed as suitable for all ages on Roblox may not fit with your definition of suitable for your young child, so close supervision is still needed.
It is advisable to lay down some ground rules about what is acceptable behaviour online and what is not, for example, talking to strangers via chat or accepting friend requests without checking with an adult first.
If all of that seems like a lot of effort for very little reward, there is still always the nuclear option: wipe the account, delete the app and hope they forget about the game.
