Roblox Boosts Parental Power with New Safety Features

Roblox today announced three new parental control features that provide parents with detailed insight into how their child uses the platform and the ability to limit which friends and experiences their child can interact with.

This comes months after Roblox overhauled its parental controls and safety systems to ensure safer play for its youngest users. The company allowed parents with verified accounts to link to and remotely manage their child’s Roblox account. At the same time, Roblox promised parents more granular controls over how their kids use the platform — the latest parental control tools aim to deliver on that commitment.

With the new parental controls, parents can not only view their child’s Roblox friends list but also block anyone they don’t want their child chatting with. Blocked users are removed from the child’s friends list and cannot be added again without parental permission.

Parents can now also see the 20 experiences their child has spent the most time in over the last week, sorted by total time. In addition, the new parental controls allow them to block specific experiences they don’t want their child to access, either from this list or from the “Blocked Experiences” section in the “Content Restrictions” part of Parental Controls.

Children under the age of 13 can’t unblock users or specific experiences by themselves. They can, however, request parental consent to unblock a user or experience through their Roblox account.

“Providing tools blocking specific friends and Roblox experiences, along with visibility into how long their child is playing Roblox games, enables parents to better support their children’s safe use of the platform,” said Larry Magid, CEO of Roblox online safety partner ConnectSafely.

“Roblox has consistently provided parents with tools that enable their children to enjoy the platform, while helping protect them against online risks. These new friend- and experience-blocking tools provide parents with even more ways to help ensure their children are using it safely. Safety, fun, and adventure are not mutually exclusive.”

Late last year, Roblox came under fire for fudging its usage metrics and being a “hellscape” for child safety. Alongside these new parental control features, the platform also added new resources to its Safety Center and rolled out an updated open-source voice safety classifier, an AI-powered tool for voice chat moderation across eight languages.