Mum, can I play Roblox? Navigating online gaming safety for parents and caregivers - EMF 2026

[applause] Ah, thank you for having me. This works. Um, so this is MC called Mom Can I Play Roblox, Navigating Online Gaming Safety for Parents and Caregivers. Um, it's sort of based around a paper I wrote where I said, "Children's minds have not fundamentally changed, but some childhoods are now being built in a digital arena that many adults do not understand." So, in this talk, I'm going to talk about what online games young people are playing nowadays, what are the risks, what we can consider when setting boundaries, and what you can do. And I want to stress this is not a you must do it this way or you can't do it this way. Every family is different. Every child is different. It's more about learning more about what's out there and how we can have a relationship with online gaming that suits the whole family. So, why should you listen to me? I've been playing video games for a job for four years. I have broken over 2 million blocks in Minecraft in that time. I have played Roblox for over 2,000 hours. And I think if my Fortnite kills were real kills, I'd probably be the worst serial killer of all time. This is how I look at work. Um, and the way I work is with young people who are neurode divergent or mentally unwell, often out of education, and I play with them, get to know them, um, learn about their world, and over time, I've got a 100% success rate of getting them back into education or some kind of educational placement. Um, but I'm a millennial, so if you're anything like me, if you think of gaming, you might think of this is from the museum near my house. It's so embarrassing. [laughter] I know, right? Unlike PlayStation 3 was I don't that was yeah it's past my time um or you might be a bit older remember the yeah but times have changed so when we look at what young children are playing nowadays this um offcom did a passive study so they tracked children's gaming traffic on their tablets and smartphones you'll see the absolute biggest is Roblox I believe all of these apart from Minecraft are free to play which like social media if It's free to play, then you are the product. They usually contain adverts and are very heavily focused towards getting you to purchase things in game with real money. But obviously 61% of children are playing Roblox. What is it? How many adults here have played Roblox before? Excellent. Most have not. So, let me introduce it to you. Peggy, who set the uh video gaming age requirements, used to say it was age seven and changed it to parental guidance recommended, saying that parents should be aware that most of the content is userenerated and therefore constantly changing and evolving. By its nature, some of the content that's added may not be suitable for young children. Revealing reality did a study, I think in 2025. They found a lot of problems. Roblox fixed the problems. They said they did. revealing reality came back and did another study and even after all the fixes they said that their child avatar was still able to experience inappropriate behavior on the chat and over audio. This included racial slurs, sexual acts and swear words. And they were also able to bypass voice chat moderation and easily exchange social media contact details. And when I surveyed the children, the parents in my children's classes, 83% of the children had played Roblox. What does it look like? Like this. These are the latest games I played with the children I work with. It's kind of a mess, so I'll introduce it to you. There are games a bit like uh Gran Turismo, like Corsera Driving, Red Line. There's the most amazing category of like Birmingham Vehicle Simulator where you can go to Gregs and get a sandwich. Not actually joking. There are kind of hobby games like fishing and cooking. Like when you get older, you might work in a hospital or dress up. And there are Skibbly Dubdub. Yes. Yes. Skibbly Toilet games. Anybody can make a game and put it on Roblox. There are some slightly scarier games, too. Medfed, you get chased by this terrifying bear. Rivals is a shooting game and die of death. I figure you can understand that. So, I just searched for scary on Roblox. This is what came up. All of these games, apart from one, are rated minimal, which says it is the safest rating designed for all ages, featuring no intense violence, gore, or inappropriate language. I believe there's no inappropriate language, but would you want your three-year-old to be playing one of those? Maybe you do. Um, that's Roblox for you. There's also Fortnite, which is rated Peggy 12 for mild violence. and 60% of the children in my children's classes have played that. And finally, Minecraft rated Peggy 7 for mild non-realistic fantasy violence and potentially scary scenes. And this was the most commonly played game in my children's classes, but that's not that's not that's not applicable to every class. So, what are the risks in gaming? The first one I would say is compulsive engagement and addiction. When I said that the free-to-play games encourage you to spend money, there are often roulette wheels. There are, especially in Roblox, if you stay for five more minutes, you'll get 10 coins. Stay for 20 minutes, you'll get 20 coins. Stay for 50 minutes, you'll get 100 coins and a chance to win something that only one in 100 people get or one in a thousand people get. And then you can pay to have more chances to win those things. And it's a cycle like fashion where in a fishing game for example, there's a new rod called the EMF rod that everybody really wants and they might spend literally hundreds of pounds to get this rod and then next season comes out and the next rod is called the Glastonbury rod and everybody wants that rod and they will spend hundreds of pounds to get that rod. Um the Ofcom did the study and they found out that of 8 to 17 year olds who've gained online in the last month, this percent of them had spent money and it was 53%. And the saddest part of that study for me was that some of the children had spent the money to not lose something that they already had got in the game, which made me really sad because children have so little uh so little control over their life and their space. They might have just finally got the really cool Glastonbury rod and then they had to spend money to not have it taken away from them. There's a concept called flow by a Hungarian psychologist called Mihi Chik Mihi. Um, and there's also a concept of pooy flow, I'm going to call it. Um, so flow is the idea that we get into a state when we are challenged but not too challenged. We are having a good time. Time flies by like you're maybe doing wood carving or something and all of a sudden you've been doing it for hours and you've got a lovely spoon which is you must all have had that experience doing something. However, these games are designed to hijack this the reward system in your brain. So you constantly feel in that state of flow, but what you're achieving often isn't anything meaningful or tangible, which ultimately leads you to be more sad when you finish it because you you haven't got anything to show for it. Whereas if you've carved a spoon, you can show your friends. If you've played a game, you're probably going to feel a bit sad that you haven't seen your friends. More issues are sleep issues. So they studied uh American adolescents. What percentage do you think are getting insufficient sleep? >> 40 80 >> 90 it's uh 77. And these are children that are growing. Their brains are growing. bodies are growing and developing and that sleep is needed to grow. And there was a shockingly high amount. I think it was like 40 getting less than 5 hours of sleep an average night. Um, but we've all probably scrolled social media late at night. And these games are very similar in terms of the way they keep you in and hook you in. Another issue is losing touch with people in real life. Um, Offcom again studied young people. How many hours do you think an 8 to 14year-old is spending on their smartphone, tablet or computer a day? six, sorry, four, eight. They're at school for like most of those hours. This isn't at school. This is just on their own personal devices and it is just under 3 hours a day. And of course, that's hours when they are not doing anything else. The saddest one uh risk in my opinion is probably sexual exploitation. This picture came from the BBC. It was Roblox uh a couple of years ago. Um Offcom do some great research. So, they went to the dark web and they asked people that were looking for indecent images of children where they would find it if they weren't on the dark web, like where they would go to for that for that stuff. And they had like 1,19 pedophiles replied to that survey, which is just it's really cool surveying, I think. I wouldn't even know how to get on the dark web, let alone anyway. And they found out that 8% of them say they would go to online games to find children. And of them of those a lot of them mentioned roadblocks by name. That's why the most commonly uh found category of indecent imagery of children is self-generated. Now I think there is an issue maybe where we think children are very vulnerable when they go out of the house to the park to a supermarket to a shop and we keep them quite locked up. But when they go online and we think it's a fun game it's number one on the app store. It looks like it's for kids. It's fine. It says age 3+. However, there aren't pedophiles hanging around in the local park, but there are an awful lot of them on some online games. And of all the children I work with that have played Roblox, almost all of them have experienced sexual harassment, assault, or um what's the word? Grooming by people, adults. So, talked about the bad things. and Anga talk about how to set boundaries. This is me um begging [laughter] and the whole game in Roblox was to just beg to get fake money. Like it sounds mad, but it's quite addictive. Like you just keep begging, getting more money. Um how do we set boundaries? Firstly, we're going to think about which games are you going to treat stuff like Duolingo or Times Table Rockstars the same as Roblox or Fortnite? Are there games you think they should have access to all the time? None of the time. Um, and which platforms are you going to have different rules for different platforms? Which certificate or which mature themes? And this might vary depending on your children or their age. So, I really recommend a website called familygamingdatabase.com. And when you go to it, you can search for games for certain ages and you can search if you don't want it to have drugs and alcohol, you don't want it to have loot boxes, which is the addictive um things that you have a chance of winning. Um, you can have no adverts, no online strangers. Um, it's also really good. They've got uh lists of games that are good for children who are grieving, children who are struggling with sibling rivalry, and they've got a great category of accessible games, too, for colorblind people, people with like one hand. Um, so I'm going to rate that website really well. Back to setting boundaries. Um, when are you going to let them play? For how long? With who? related to for how long is the end time and I think there are kind of three and I think as parents we've probably done all of these at some point with our children. Number one 7:00 we're getting off the console. Good. Number two when it's dinner time when we're going to go out when the cars deiced we're going to go. And number three is just when we kind of get sick of it. We go right time to get off do something fun. Get off the screens. Number two, I think, is the one of the hardest ones for children. Um, because they don't really have the same concept we do of how long it takes to, for example, a takeaway to arrive or for chips to be cooked. And because of that, if you're playing a game like Fortnite where the whole aim of the game is to go from a 100 people on an island to one person, if the clock's ticking down and you're like in the top three and your mom says, "Right, it's time to have dinner." I would be quite angry if I was kicked up at that point. It's a bit like you're at a cliffhanger episode of East Enders and somebody turns the TV off and goes, "Right, time to go out and have fun." It's not very fair. And of course, you're going to get quite angry. So, talk to your kids about what they're doing. And if you can make a compromise, this will be your last round of Fortnite, for example. That might be helpful. And of course, this will change over time and it must be an ongoing conversation because the rules we set for our kids when they're three will not be the rules we set for our kids when they're 13. So, I'm going to talk about the ways some boundaries can be subverted. This image came from Roblox 3 weeks ago. I reported it the whole game because the game is a nightclub where people jerate on other people. It was still up a week later, still available for all ages, and there were still topless people in Roblox there. One way they can be survited is from the games, but it could be just through playing at a friend's house. So, I've known many parents that have been quite strict on what games their children play and then they they come. My supervisor, in fact, she was like, "My son was at his friend's house and he played Fortnite and I don't know how to deal with this." Um, and you can't keep them safe in a bubble forever. It might also be through seeing footage on YouTube. It's very common nowadays. In fact, when my son was in year one, all the children in his school were playing Grand Theft Auto in the playground. I don't think they actually played the game. They may have played the game, but it was um one of those moments where you realize that as strict as you can be in your household, society and culture all around. A way I have seen is that a child will make a second auto account. So if you've set your kid up really carefully on Roblox and had it really safely as safe as you can do it and their account is EMF festival then their child might make similar account but EMF F number one V A L and when you flick over to look at their screen it looks like their old account so you're thinking they're great but actually this child is able to talk to anybody on the game is able to uh get email addresses said they're an adult. Um, I've seen that happen a number of times with children I work with. One thing I'm often told by parents who think Roblox is great is they only play on private servers with friends. However, you have to select a private server. You can't just set it so they can only go on a private server. So, you have to click away from the main game and onto a private server, which is easy to forget. And also, a lot of these games, they one of the KPIs is how much time you spend on the game. So they will often have it so you have to go to public server to meet more people. So your your goal for the day will be to I don't know tag eight strangers which you can't do in a private server. So it encourages you to go to a bigger server and tag eight people so you get your four golden ingots that help you get the EMF rod maybe. Um, another really common one, when we set our like thresholds so high, like we set real good safety, sometimes life just gets in the way and we just go, "Oh, the pin number is um" and then they remember it cuz kids have a really good memory for stuff like that and a terrible one for when it's time to brush your teeth. It's it's insane. Um, another common one also that I've seen is a child can ask an older child, a teenager to scan their face. So sometimes they'll know that a kid in school scans as over 18 and they will all scan that one so they can get access to the adult Roblox. Equally, adults who play Roblox can scan their child's face to get access to child Roblox. So they have set it now so that adults shouldn't be able to communicate with children in that game. But if I scan my son's face, I can still communicate with people in my age group. But they're not my age group, they're his age group. That is the only way of checking age. It can just be as simple as a child lies about what they're playing. Um, and it can be the game changes the settings. So, it might be that you've set it up really carefully and then there's been an update and then it has now changed the default to being like chat is on, which has happened to me randomly and it's really annoying. What challenges can we face when doing this? Um, like tie-ins and special interests. If your kid is really into something like K-pop Demon Hunters and the Fortnite K-pop Demon Hunters comes out, it can be really hard to navigate that. Um, it can be everybody else's, right? The peer pressure of it's not fair. When it comes to my children when they've said, "Can I play Roblox?" I always say, "We all have different rules. In my house, you can drink with alcohol at a festival. I'll give you a bit of cider." Other parents don't let that. Other parents have different times. Other parents have different rules about what they eat or we might have more pudding. And my rule about certain games is you're not playing them. It could be other caregivers. So you're doing great. Your kid is perfectly wonderfully happy. They go to grandma's for the day and they come back having played Roblox all day. >> [laughter] >> In that case, I suggest the family gaming database and trying to find games that might cost some money you can download to granny's phone that might be um less uh what's the word? Addictive, less compulsive, more relaxing. It's definitely worth paying for games, I think, because it means, you know, they have no incentive to keep you playing. If you're not paying for it, their biggest incentive is to keep you on there for longer. A bit like social media. I just put like times of parental stress like I don't know you could be caring for an elderly relative. It could be you're coming down with like DMV and at that point who cares if you play Roblox. Oh well I'm vomiting in the toilet. In which case I suggest going back to that list of things and before it happens talking with your partner or other caregivers about which things you're willing to seed on. It might be when we're all sick, you can play on the big TV in the lounge you can't normally play on, but you still can play for 2 hours a day, for example. It might be you can play for 4 hours a day, but you definitely can't do online gaming. So, if you know that in advance of when something happens, you've sort of got a plan in place rather than one parent going, "I'm being sick. Just do whatever you want." Another parent going, "I'm being sick. Go write a story." And the kids being confused. Um holidays. This is my youngest EMF last time. Um, we can set different boundaries on holidays. We all need a break. It can just be the easy option, right? Like it's like, look, it's like, I'm bored. You're like, well, you can go paint a picture. I don't want to do painting. Well, you can, I don't know, go outside. It's too hot to go outside. What do you want to do? Play a game. Sure, play a game. But I want to stress that all of these are made much harder by the addictive nature of these games. It really is almost like social media. the the way it attracts and keeps you playing and keeps you being engaged. So, what can we do as parents and caregivers? You could set your kid up with a sort of iMac and say, "Play a textbased game." But in the real world, we can't do that all the time. So, I really recommend just putting on your calendar like every 6 months just a recurring thing just to uh check your online platforms, check the settings. You might have changed them at one point so they could play on talk online with a friend they know and they might have just never changed it back. And if you have that in your calendar, you just keep checking it cuz it might be the games changed it. It might be you let something change. It might be your partner didn't you didn't know about it and um yeah, it's definitely worth doing. Um play the games they're playing with them at least occasionally. They might be really boring, but to your kid it is their favorite thing in the whole wide world. And to take an interest in that. As everybody at EMF can attest to, if your special interest is loved by the people around you, you feel so happy. And even though we might think it is absolute brain rot slop, for them it is their liar scanning session they went to yesterday that they loved. Um, and just to keep the conversation going about online safety. And what I really wanted to stress is just to normalize making mistakes. And all children are curious. I remember when I was at school, the boys were searching for Bond girls on Google and that's how they got pictures of like topless women. Every child is curious, wants to find out. And it children will go on to Roblox and search for find friends, find a boyfriend, learn about sex. And we all make mistakes. I've told my kids my I spent pictures of my boobs when I was a teenager to men from the internet. One of whom I was dancing until 2:00 in the morning at the bar and he comes here. So, some people are good on the internet. Some of them are not good. But the point is we all make mistakes. And if your kids know you have also done stupid stuff and sent pictures of yourself, then they're not going to feel so bad when they and so ashamed when they do the same thing. Because it is, especially for young boys, it can feel very ashamed, very isolating, and they can feel like the only person in the world who would be that stupid. But I bet you every man and woman in here has sent a picture of their genitalia to somebody they care about or thought they cared about or has wanted to do it at one point. So don't feel like you're the only person that would ever do that because you are not. And there have been young boys who have actually killed themselves because of the shame of that and they haven't been able to tell their parents and they get blackmailed by people from online games and say, "We'll tell your parents. will tell your school will send these pictures to your friends. And the young boys would rather kill themselves than tell their parents. I sent a picture of my penis to somebody online. And I hope no kids in this audience have that happen to them. Yeah, that's pretty much my talk. The reason why I Well, the reason why I say [applause] KEEP the reason why I say keep the conversation going is because even if we have really good strong rules in our house, which I'm sure you all do because you can set really good rules on all your routters. I'm certain of it. is that they they may go to see a friend. And if we are more open about this and more honest and just accepting of things can go wrong. If they find a way to access things they shouldn't or see something they shouldn't or they found Roblox on their friends thing or they've downloaded and they shouldn't have and they found a game that really scares them. Then they are able to come to you and go, "I downloaded Roblox. I mapped out mom." Rather than hide it and be ashamed. In my daughter's year, every kid in her class apart from her found a really terrifying Roblox game and they were having nightmares about it and screaming about it in school and these things happen. But if your kid is aware that even if they break the rules you've set, you're still going to be there for them and it's not the end of the world. It means they've got somebody to go to and they won't be on their own with all that fear. Um, I'm happy to answer questions. I'm at EMF obviously. You can email me too. Um, this is my special interest, I guess. And I hope it's been helpful, useful. Um, thank you for coming to my TED [applause]