How do I keep my kid safe in games that have other players in them?

Start by not making the game the enemy

For one in three young people in a survey of 1,200 nine to seventeen year olds, their closest friendship had formed online.

Read that before the warnings, because it is why a blanket ban tends to fail. A child building something with three friends on a server is doing something sociable and often creative, and treating it as a threat teaches them that you do not understand the thing and cannot be consulted about it. You want to be consultable. Everything below depends on it.

The risk lives in the channel

Minecraft and Roblox arrive as two things wearing one name. There is a world your child plays in, and there is an open communication channel to whoever else is present. Parents approve the game without realizing they are allowing communications as well.

But you can separate them. Chat can be limited to friends, voice can be off, and the game underneath carries on being the game. The single most useful sentence here is that allowing a game is not the same as allowing an open channel to adults you have never met, and the two features have entirely different settings. The chat and communication toggles for each console are on the device settings page.

Roblox is not one game so much as a platform of worlds made by other users, and a world somebody uploaded last week is a different proposition from something a studio built and tested. Judge the room you find, whatever brand hangs on the door.

The move to watch for

In the same survey, two thirds of children said somebody they had met online had asked them to move from a public place into a private conversation on a different app.

That is the step worth teaching. It is also gloriously easy to describe. Somebody asking you to carry on this chat somewhere else is the signal, whoever they are, however nice they have been, and no matter what reason they give. It’s not a reason to panic, but it’s a reason to come and tell an adult.

Teach the awareness more than the list of dangerous apps. You can make them aware of risky apps and the reasons why they’re risky, but keep in mind that the apps change every year.

Gifts are not generosity

Buying things for a child creates obligation and, more usefully to an adult with bad intentions, creates something to keep quiet about. In games this looks like Robux, or a skin, or a battle pass appearing as a present from somebody generous.

There is evidence behind this. In April 2026, Roblox settled with the Attorney General of Alabama, and among the changes it agreed to make was giving parents the ability to restrict transfers of in-game currency from adults to their children. A state regulator wrote that control into a legal settlement, which tells you what it is for.

So when this site tells you elsewhere to turn off in-game purchases because they are the engine behind compulsive design, that is true but only part of a larger issue you need to address.

What is different this year

The same settlement requires Roblox to check the age of all users, and to stop adults and under sixteens from chatting at all unless they are identified as trusted friends. Communications involving children are not to be encrypted, so that police can act on them.

A settlement is not a court finding that a company harmed anyone, and it should not be read as one. What it means practically is that controls which did not exist a year ago exist now. Go and look at the parental settings on any account your child already has, because they will not have been turned on for you.

They will not necessarily walk away

Here is the finding that should change how you plan.

Nearly a quarter of the children surveyed stayed in contact with somebody who had made them uncomfortable.

Most parents are relying, without realizing it, on a plan that goes: something feels wrong, so my child blocks them and tells me. That is not what tends to happen. Discomfort and continued contact can sit sneakily together, especially where a friendship has been built first. But this can mask grooming by an adult, or bullying by another child.

The lesson here is that settings matter more than they ought to, and the standing promise matters most of all. Say it before it is needed: if anything goes wrong in there, telling me makes it better and not worse, nobody is losing the game over it, and I will not be angry. Then, when something small happens, keep your word.

The techniques these conversations run on are the same ones covered under who is actually on the other end, and are worth naming with your child directly.

What to say

When you want to see who they play with:

“Who’s on your friends list? Tell me about them. Which ones do you know from actual life?”

When you set the currency control:

“This one isn’t about money. If a grown-up ever wants to buy you something in a game, I want to know about it.”

When you teach awareness:

“If anyone ever asks you to talk somewhere else – another app, a private chat, anything – that’s the moment you come and tell me. You won’t be in trouble.”

When this doesn’t apply

Single-player and local co-op games raise none of this. Neither does a private server with four children who know each other from school, which is most of what Minecraft actually is in practice.

And a teenager with a long-standing online friendship is not in the same situation as a nine-year-old in an open lobby. The older the child, the more this becomes a conversation about how manipulation works rather than a set of switches, because the switches stop being enforceable and the understanding is what has to carry them.