Roblox Announces Updates to Safety Systems and Parental Controls

On the heels of the new teen Instagram accounts, another major player is rolling out some changes for young users. Roblox, a wildly popular gaming platform, announced changes to its safety systems and parental controls, impacting users younger than 13 years old. This will have many parents breathing a sigh of relief as this platform has a lot of young users. In fact, in the third quarter of 2024, Roblox had 34 million daily active users younger than 13 years old.

While Roblox has some safety measures in place, the gaming platform has been criticized for not offering enough parental controls. Access to existing controls was a problem too; parents could only access parental controls through their child’s account. So, if a child was logged into their account and not physically near their parents, parental controls were out of reach.

The main updates to Roblox’s safety systems and parent controls include:

• Remote management of parent controls: Parents can now access their child’s account with their own Roblox account (after linking them) and manage and monitor their child’s gaming experience. This is a big change and should make accessing and updating these limits much easier for parents. Within these parental controls parents can:
  • Set spend limits: Parents can set spend limits for their kids, which will limit the amount of real money kids can spend on in-game purchases.
  • View their child’s friends list: Parents can now see their child’s friends list.
  • Set screen time limits: Parents can set a daily limit on screen time. When a child hits the limit, they will not be able to access Roblox until the next day.
• Content restriction: Experiences within Roblox will no longer be labeled by age, since children mature at different rates. Now, experiences will be categorized into four filter levels called “Content Label”: Minimal, Mild, Moderate and Restricted. This is intended to provide parents with better information to decide what content is appropriate for their child. User age 9 and younger can only access “Minimal” or “Mild” content by default (parents can change this if they want to).
• Communication restrictions for users younger than 13: Roblox players younger than 13 will no longer be able to send direct messages to anyone outside of a game or experience. A new default setting will limit all messages they do send within a game to be public broadcast messages only. These changes will all be implemented by the first quarter of 2025.
• “Age-gating” experiences: Users younger than 13 will no longer be allowed to access some Roblox experiences, including those that are designed for socializing with users outside their friends list, and experiences that allow free-form writing or drawing.

Head to the Roblox website to learn how to link your account to your child’s, and how to set up parental controls.