I’m usually pretty chill about my kids playing video games. We keep time limits strict, and they prefer playing group games like Mario Kart or educational games with their favorite characters like PBS Kids or Sesame Street.

But I noticed they have trouble connecting with friends and cousins worldwide when we talk on the phone. Their lives are so different, and there isn’t a lot of common ground if they haven’t seen each other in a while. On a recent call, they spent a lot of time trying not to interrupt each other until my oldest heard his younger friend didn’t know the game “Rock, Paper, Scissors” and so proceeded to teach him! That opened up a whole series of fun games to play together.

Based on their chats with their seven-year-old cousin, I heard Roblox is a good way to “play together.” Even my parents have accounts to play with him. I get nervous about games that involve online chat rooms, but I was assured that you could turn those off.

After a little research and some time with a more experienced six-year-old who helped me set up an account, we presented it as a gift to his friend, my son. Thanks to a few strict parental controls and open, honest conversations about what is safe and why, Roblox wasn’t as scary as I thought. For now.

Here are the parental controls I set:

Disable chat or set it to “friends only”

Go to Privacy tab > account settings > account restrictions for this feature. Online chat rooms are one of my biggest fears when it comes to gaming, so this setting alone put me 50% more at ease.

Set an account pin to make any changes to restrictions.

Make sure it isn’t the same pin as any other device, as kiddos are great at picking up on your codes.

Here are the ground rules we set with our children for their game time:

Follow these rules or it will be uninstalled.

It helps that we just went through this process with YouTube. I told them if I didn’t like a channel or a certain video, I would tell them why. We could talk about it, but I can block it from their laptop. They can either accept this or revert to YouTube Kids, which has much more restrictive access to videos and is quite frankly, a pain in the butt for parents.

So we spent most of the first night we had Roblox playing it together and setting the ground rules as we went, making it an open discussion on why something may or may not be safe. That’s when I learned that:

We don’t ever use your real name.

This is a pretty big one for us in general. Since they were born, we’ve used nicknames for our kids 98% of the time and deleted the many comments by our parents when that rule was forgotten. It’s fun to choose a nickname for yourself, too!

Rules for Roblox are good rules for life.

Would you accept an invitation to a party from a stranger? Would you let someone you don’t know inside your house? Would you give a stranger your phone number? No? Not until college? Then don’t do that in the game either. Since I had never played before, we always played a new game together the first time in case more ground rules needed to be laid. I’m open about the reasoning behind it, and we don’t usually require a big discussion.

If you want to spend Robux, we’ll talk about it first.

I started him off with a few dollars in his Robux account, just because some games require a little something and so we could figure out how to set perimeters for spending. The rule then became: if you want to spend that money, just call me over, and we’ll discuss it. Two things usually happen; he’ll talk himself out of it before I do because he’ll see how little he’ll have left if he spends it, or we decide it’s okay. A fun side effect of this is that when relatives across the world want to buy him something, but it will cost so much to ship anything, and the last thing they need is more “stuff,” their Auntie Kelly can buy them Robux for Christmas!

If the game involves violence, especially killing people, we must talk about it and play together first.

I find he’s much more open and responsible if we can discuss certain boundaries. If he knows that it isn’t always an outright “no” to his question, he’s more likely to ask and not try to sneak it. One time we’d set him off on a fun-looking game, and I focused on my laptop next to him when I heard, “So it’s okay if we didn’t know it was a killing game, right?” I assured him he wasn’t in trouble, we assessed the level of violence and its role in the game together, and that was that. Ultimately I decided against it, but he was involved in the process and didn’t fight me on it.

Only play when his Dad, babysitter, or I am with him.

I still sit next to him when he plays a new game, as will his Dad and babysitter, who also plays. We don’t always play together, but ‘I’m there to watch what he’s doing.

Eventually, we’ll learn to build a game of our own together. 

One of the reasons why lots of parents like Roblox is that you can build your own game. All the games on its system are player built, which gets kids into coding and self-learning. Once we’d played through a few games and had gaming time with his cousin in Boston, my kid opened up his Scratch Jr. program much more often than his Roblox games. He wants to learn how to build his own game, and that’s super cool in our books.

Other Perks

Since we started with these ground rules, making them part of the experience instead of imposing limits once bad habits were already established, conversations about other types of technology have been easier too. We started playing “Among Us” as a family, which is extremely fun, and they didn’t even blink an eye when I said they never press the “Public” button because we only want to play with people we know.

It’s a good introduction to safety online and will hopefully instill some honest gut checks for when they make decisions more on their own. I’m much happier after opening this door to them as long as we make the map together. If I’d tried just to keep it closed, my kids or their friends would have eventually shoved it open without my guidance, and who knows what would have happened then? Now they get to stay in touch with family members and Beijing friends who moved away in a safe and fun way.

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