Is ROBLOX Safe For Kids? 5 Game Safety Tips For Parents

IS ROBLOX SAFE? There’s several articles swirling the internet explaining the dangers of the popular children’s game Roblox.

I totally get it. Parent’s Guide to Roblox is one of our popular posts. People want to know what their kids are playing and if it’s bad. KUDOS to you because caring about what your kids play online is step one to keeping your children protected online.

Is ROBLOX Safe for Kids?

There are parts of the Roblox game that are bad, yes and unfortunately with the insane world that we live in – most things that are good also have bad.

Recent Facebook and other social platforms have been circulating news of online sexual predators on the Roblox platform. Is this true? Most likely. Should we be surprised? NOPE.

Roblox Kids – Should Kids Play?

Does this mean your child should stop playing Roblox? Well that is up to you – but I will say this. You MUST pay attention to everything your kids do online, Roblox included.

5 Tips to Keep Roblox Safe for Kids

We are talking tips to help keep Roblox safe for kids. Let’s learn about the game and more about these useful Roblox safety tips.

Check your kids private messages. Put safe chat on Roblox for additional safety.
Make sure your child is following the Roblox rules of conduct.
Teach your child boundaries on the game.
Limit the time you kid spends playing Roblox.
Show your child how to report any misconduct.

How Many People Play Roblox Games?

The game currently has 70 million monthly active players. They hit a record in December with over 900,000 peak concurrent users.

Roblox Facts

Here are some Roblox facts that I found mind-blowing.

twelfth highest grossing iPhone app
third highest grossing iPad app
fourth most downloaded free-to-play app in Games
top most downloaded free-to-play app in Family on Google Play
sixth best-selling free-to-play game on Amazon
top free downloaded app on Windows 10 and Xbox One

Parenting Digital Kids

The only thing I can preach time and time again is knowing exactly what your kids are doing online at all times.

Digital kids – these kids don’t know anything BUT the internet. They are digital natives in every sense but it is our job to guide them.

How we roll: Our kids know that we have full access to anything and everything that they do both on their computers and on their phones. That means monitoring who they are talking to, what Roblox games they are playing, checking their private messages in apps.

ROBLOX Safe Chat – Check Kids Private Messages

Make sure that ROBLOX safe chat is enabled. This is available in your Roblox account settings.

Side note – make sure you check Instagram private messages. That means being 100% aware of technologies that they are using at all times. Does this mean that they will be shielded from all bad things? No. But it does mean that we are there to guide them to what is right and what is wrong.

Unfortunately, the world isn’t all happy good people. Parenting digital kids means being aware of all the things and guiding them to make the right choices, understand what is good and what is bad. It also means saying NO when you feel that something isn’t right for your child.

As much as we love to point our fingers at this online game as being BAD – it’s not just that black and white. We, as parents need to be mindful of all the things that are kids are doing online – not just Roblox.

Keeping Kids Safe Online

When our daughter was 6 or 7, she had a computer. Take it this was 7 years ago and filtering was not where it was today. She had a computer in the kitchen and came running into my husband’s office needing her computer fixed.

She had downloaded a virus. Come to find out, she was googling “Fairy games” which had pulled up all kinds of inappropriateness. An innocent search can lead to bad things, just like the game Roblox who has millions of people playing it can lead to bad things.

Roblox Online Safety

With Roblox being an online game for kids – it is in their best interest to keep the game as safe as possible. But again, I’ll reiterate – there are 44 million people actively playing.

Here is what Roblox says in regards to children and online safety:

We also strive to protect our players safety by proactively filtering inappropriate content and acting against anyone who is in violation of our Rules of Conduct.
At Roblox, we believe everyone should have the right to imagine, create, and play together in a safe, family-friendly environment. This means we take kids safety and privacy very seriously.
Roblox is committed to fully complying with the Children’ s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) to ensure the privacy of our users age 12 and under and prevent them from sharing personal info via chat messages or in-game.
Although users age 13 and older can adjust more account settings and have an expanded vocabulary list, Roblox employs a filtering system and moderation team to help keep players safe and restrict sharing personally identifiable information.
Yes, users age 13 and over can customize their security settings.
For users age 12 and under, however, we take extra precaution to ensure their safety and privacy by automatically enforcing more restricted settings so they can only directly message other users that are accepted as friends on Roblox.
To add even more security, you can enable 2-Step Verification. This feature can be found in your Account Settings Security tab. For more information, please see our FAQ article with all the details about this security feature.

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Roblox Reporting

If you encounter a situation in Roblox – report it. Roblox reporting is what help keeps the Roblox game safe.

How Can I Report Something Bad in Roblox?

Here is what the game suggests that you do to report the bad behavior:

Players can now report inappropriate chat messages or content by using our Report Abuse system, which is located throughout the site and in-game.
In addition to reporting any rule violations, players can also completely block others from chatting or playing with them in-game or on the website.
You can block other players on the website by visiting the offending user s Roblox profile, clicking the three dots that appear in the upper right-hand corner, and then clicking Block User in the drop-down menu.
Additionally, you can block other players on the website by visiting the offending users Roblox profile, clicking the three dots that appear in the upper right-hand corner, and then clicking Block User in the drop-down menu.
Another way to block players in-game is by clicking on their name on the leaderboard, and then selecting Block User.”

I don’t want to down play anyone that has had a innocent child experience an inappropriate situation in Roblox.

I do want to emphasize that it’s not just Roblox that is bad and why exactly this game is the way it is, and what you can do when encountering an inappropriate situation.

Do You Let Your Kids Play Roblox? How Do You Keep Them Safe Online?

Is ROBLOX safe for kids? View more from Digital Mom Technology

Mason

Friday 17th of March 2017

Hi, I'm a kid who's played Roblox for about 5 years now. I can assure you that Roblox is completely safe in my opinion, and though there are a few bad apples, those apples are taken care of pretty quickly. The concern now is that since Roblox has added a way for under 13 to chat without a restricted menu (which was called safechat. Basically, kids under 13 could only say the words they clicked on on that list, couldn't see other words, and could only see the words from people if they too used that same menu.) it's been hard to moderate things. They've added a strict filter system that #s anything close to a bad word. It's much more restrictive than it used to be. Trust me. I used to see kids get around the F word filter all the time, now I've tried doing the same thing as an experiment... and it censored it with number signs (#). Even the GUI (graphic user interfaces), which people made so that other people could either talk to them without the filter, or just for interactive things like admin commands or game narratives, are now censored. Unfortunately, that also censored usernames too, and Roblox is still working on trying to ensure the filter is safe, but doesn't mess up game play.

Roblox has recently added the ability to prevent people from chatting with you in game, parent pins to access accounts (this goes for 13+ accounts as well, by the way. So in case you need to access your teenagers' account, go ahead and set up a parent pin! You can also prevent people from talking to them in game, or in app, or even just on the general website as well.) Basically, under 13 is much more restrictive than over 13. That's about it. If your kid understands the risks, knows how to report things, etc, then do a 13+ account. Otherwise, go under 13. It's up to you as the parent.

If you want to know my experience with "bad apples" I'll give it to you. In August of 2013, some guy decided it'd be a great idea to hack the game to get a sex game on the front page! A sex game! Luckily, Roblox handled the situation quickly, content deleted the place, banned the perpetrator, and cleared the place to a clean baseplate so that no one could see what it was. (So whenever you entered the game- which was still on the front page for a few hours after that- it was just an empty baseplate.)

Other than that, Roblox is an amazing site, and I truly recommend it! It's a great way to express creativity, build your own game, and even learn how to program! You can get an internship and a job off of this stuff!:)