Is Roblox Safe for Kids? What 2,000 Parent and Child Reviews Actually Reported

The short answer: not one game, and not safe or unsafe in general

"Is Roblox safe?" sounds like a question about one game. It isn't one game. Roblox is a platform of millions of games made by other users, and that single fact drives almost everything in the study this article is built on. A research team from Clemson University, the University at Buffalo and UTSA — Ruchi Panchanadikar and six colleagues, publishing at the CHI 2026 conference — read and coded 2,000 reviews of Roblox posted on Common Sense Media: 1,000 written by parents and 1,000 written by children who play it. The reviews were randomly sampled from the most recent two years of a larger pool of 7,081 reviews, and five researchers coded them against a shared list of 17 possible risks, agreeing with each other at a high rate before they started (a reliability statistic called Fleiss' kappa came out at 0.887, where 1.0 is perfect agreement).

So this is not a laboratory test of Roblox, and it is not a count of how many children get harmed. It is something rarer: the risks as described by the children experiencing them, side by side with the risks as described by their parents. Parents and children largely agreed on the list. They did not agree on how much of each risk there is — and that gap is the most useful finding in the paper.

The six risks both parents and children kept reporting

Six risks appeared in more than 10% of both parents' and children's reviews. One caution before the numbers: a percentage here is the share of reviews that mentioned a risk, not the share of children it happened to. A family that had a frightening experience is far more likely to write a review than a family where nothing went wrong. What the numbers honestly show is which risks are common enough in players' own accounts to keep surfacing, in both generations' words.

The most-mentioned risk overall was violent content inside games — 23.4% of parents' reviews and 28.4% of children's. Because anyone can build a game, players described shooters, horror games and games built around killing, some with visible blood, and game mechanics that reward violent behaviour with money or points. One parent of a 10-year-old listed genres running from first-person shooters to "torture and suicide games" found by digging deeper into the site.

The second pattern is about other players. Bullying, harassment and trolling appeared in 16.3% of parents' reviews and 22.8% of children's, much of it travelling through live text chat: swearing, threats, and insults aimed at religion, race, and — very commonly — at what a child's avatar looks like and whether its clothes were bought with paid currency. Children who cannot spend sit visibly lower in the social hierarchy, and the reviews describe that being used against them.

Scams and leaking personal information appeared in 14.9% of parents' reviews and 23.0% of children's. The pattern is consistent: fake games or players promise free Robux — the platform's paid currency — and ask for a password. One child, age 9, described it plainly: "Some people make scam games [...] they will ask for your password, claiming to give you things too good to be true, like Robux for free." The researchers note that information sharing often moves off Roblox entirely, onto other platforms, where the game's rules no longer apply at all.

Games becoming online dating appeared in 12.9% of parents' reviews and 21.5% of children's. Roblox's own rules prohibit romantic behaviour, but reviewers described dedicated dating spaces and players pursuing relationships in-game — the community's own word for them is "ODers." The researchers flag the gap between the two percentages directly: children reported it far more than parents, which suggests a good deal of it happens outside parental awareness.

Designs that encourage unauthorized purchases appeared in 13.1% of parents' reviews and 10.0% of children's — the one risk parents reported more than children. Reviewers described games engineered so spending feels unavoidable: pay, or lose the valuable item you already have. Parents see the payment alerts; children experience the pressure as just how the game works.

And ineffective moderation appeared in 25.2% of parents' reviews — the parents' single most-mentioned risk — and 15.7% of children's. That one sits underneath all the others.

Is Roblox safe for 7 year olds? What the youngest reviewers' accounts show

The study grouped child players into three age bands — under 6, 6 to 12, and 13 to 17 — so a 7-year-old sits at the young end of its middle group. Two findings matter for this age. First, for the under-6 group, parents and children mentioned the six risks at statistically indistinguishable rates: the researchers found no significant difference between the generations on any risk. Second, the social risks were mentioned far less for the youngest children overall. Counting parents' and children's reviews together, bullying drew 20 mentions for under-6 players, against 177 mentions for ages 6 to 12 and 177 for ages 13 to 17; ineffective moderation drew just 10 mentions under 6, against 124 and 139 in the older groups.

That pattern should not be read as "safe at 7." The study counts what reviewers wrote about, and the youngest children write the fewest reviews — children under 6 barely post on review sites at all, so their experiences are mostly reported second-hand, if at all. What the data does support is narrower: the risks that dominate the reviews — peer bullying, moderation failures, social pressure — are described overwhelmingly in connection with older children's more independent, more social play. A 7-year-old's risk profile in these accounts is quieter partly because their play is more supervised and less social, not because the platform changes at their age. The platform's own stricter filters for under-13s are a baseline, in the authors' framing — they assume risk is uniform inside broad age bands, which is exactly the assumption this study questions.

Is Roblox safe for 10 year olds? The age where parents and children diverge most

The 6-to-12 group — the band that contains most 10-year-olds — is where the parent–child gap was widest. The researchers describe the divergences as minimal in early childhood, most pronounced in the pre-teen years, and moderate again in adolescence.

Among 6-to-12 reviewers, children mentioned scams and leaking personal information at 21.58%, against 9.80% for parents of children that age. Children mentioned gaming turning into online dating at 20.45%, against 11.66% for parents. Children mentioned bullying at 20.29%, against 14.19% for parents. Read those three gaps together and they say something specific: by the pre-teen years, children are meeting the social risks first-hand, in-game, in real time — and roughly half of that picture is not reaching their parents' accounts of the same platform.

The gap runs the other way for money. Parents of 6-to-12-year-olds mentioned purchase-pushing design at 13.85%, against 4.67% for children — and the researchers note this is plausibly the developmental stage when children start engaging with in-game transactions, which parents encounter as card charges and children encounter as ordinary gameplay. In the teenage group the money gap widens further: parents at 17.53%, children at 2.70%.

For a parent of a 10-year-old, that is an uncomfortable paragraph to read. The risks you can see from outside — the spending — are the ones children notice least. The risks children notice most are the ones you are least likely to hear about. Asking a 10-year-old directly what happens in their games stops being a nice extra here. In this data, it is the only way most of these risks surface at all.

Is Roblox safe for kids with parental controls? What reviewers said about moderation

Roblox has rules, filters and a moderation system, and parents setting up controls are relying on exactly that machinery. So the reviewers' verdict on it matters. Ineffective moderation was the most-mentioned risk in parents' reviews (25.2%) and appeared in 15.7% of children's — and the paper breaks the failure down into three specific problems.

First, circumvention: players evade chat filters by breaking words into letters or swapping in symbols, and reviewers — including a 15-year-old quoted in the paper — described this as easy and routine. Second, context: much of what harms children in these accounts is ambiguous behaviour — following that becomes stalking, teasing that becomes harassment — which automated systems are poor at judging, because the same act can be friendly or hostile depending on pattern and history. Third, spillover: Roblox-related content and contact move to YouTube, Discord and other platforms, where Roblox's moderation has no reach at all. A child can meet the mature content through a video about the game without ever opening the game.

The honest conclusion the paper supports is not "controls are useless." It never tested controls, settings by settings — no reviewer study can. What it shows is that the platform's rules and filters, as experienced by the families writing these reviews, did not prevent the other five risks from being their most common stories. Parental controls sit upstream of some of this — they can restrict chat, spending and which games a child can enter — but the study gives no evidence that any setting removes the risks, and repeated evidence that determined players route around the automated layer. Treat controls as one layer, not the answer.

Is Roblox safe for kids if chat is disabled? What travels through chat — and what doesn't

Chat is the channel for a large share of what the reviews describe. Bullying and harassment in the accounts travelled mainly through live text chat. The online-dating behaviour begins in chat. The scam, though, usually only starts there: the password request or the "free Robux" promise is the hook, and the interaction then moves to another platform entirely. And none of the content risks travel through chat at all — a violent game is violent with chat off, silent, and a spending trap spends just as well muted.

The study did not compare children with chat on against children with chat off, so it cannot tell you that disabling chat makes a child safe, or put a number on how much safer it makes them. What its evidence does support is a ranking. Turning chat off removes the main road for stranger contact and for the verbal abuse reviewers described, and that is a real reduction in the social risks. It leaves the other three categories — violent content, purchase pressure, and anything that moves off-platform — exactly where they were. Chat off is a meaningful layer for a young child. The study's own findings are the reason it cannot be the only one.

What this research can't tell you

These are reviews, not a census. The 2,000 reviews were self-selected, written in English, on one site (Common Sense Media), by people motivated enough to post. The percentages are shares of reviews mentioning a risk — they are not the probability that your child will meet that risk, and the authors say so in their own limitations. Families with extreme experiences, good or bad, post more.

It measures reports, not harm. No child's wellbeing, development or safety outcome was measured. A review mentioning violent content tells you the content was there and bothered the reviewer; it does not tell you what exposure did to any particular child.

Age had no simple effect. Overall, age alone only weakly predicted how often risks were mentioned (the combined model's R² was 0.1482 — age explained only a small share of the variation), and several chi-square effects the study found were statistically significant but small (Cramér's V values were small throughout). The authors ran the analysis exploratorily, without predefined hypotheses. There is no age in this paper at which Roblox becomes safe, and the paper's whole argument is against expecting one: it proposes developmentally responsive safety models instead of a single age threshold.

It never tested any fix. No parental control, chat setting, supervision style or platform change was trialled. The strategies below are consistent with the findings — they are labelled as strategy, not as tested interventions.

It is Roblox only. The authors note other user-generated platforms may differ; nothing here automatically transfers to Minecraft, Fortnite or any other platform, each of which needs its own evidence.

Frequently Asked Questions

The takeaway

Two thousand reviews, half from the children themselves, converge on a short list: violent user-made games, bullying through chat, scams baited with free Robux, dating behaviour the rules already ban, spending engineered to feel unavoidable, and a moderation system both generations watched things slip through. The finding that should change behaviour at home is the gap. Parents see the spending. Children see the scams, the dating approaches and the bullying — at the pre-teen ages, at roughly double the rate. So the honest answer to "is Roblox safe for kids?" is that no setting answers it. The family that closes the awareness gap — by asking specific questions, often — is working with the best evidence this study offers.