What Parents Need to Know About Roblox

This summer I'm doing a series on What Parent's Need to Know about *insert some type of online thing here*... because it's not just parents that need to know these things but teachers too AND if there is one thing we all know it's that online stuff changes so often it's hard to keep up (especially when you aren't even using that app/program)!

Today I'm talking about Roblox.

If there is one thing I know about Roblox (which before looking at this poster was the only thing I knew about Roblox) is that it is very popular amongst elementary aged kids.

You can find this free to download from National Online Safety

So what did I learn about Roblox?

Roblox can you earn you money.  This one is interesting to me because with the whole E Sports stuff around (did you see the news article of a teen winning 3 million playing FortNite?) it isn't something that I would really encourage... surely it can't be a good sound job for forever... but for an 8 year old... have at it.  Anyways, apparently if you create something in Roblox appealing enough you can earn Robux which if you earn enough of can be turned into actual money through a PayPal account.  Interesting.

Otherwise, it has a lot of the same stuff as other online things have these days.  

There is a chat option that can be disabled (and likely should be if you are young)

There are in game purchases (although the game is free to play).  So be careful and don't have your credit card linked to your child's Roblox account.. or link it and maybe don't be so surprised if one day there is hundreds of dollars of purchases on it from Roblox.  Whoops.

You don't have to show everyone your social media accounts in Roblox and you can hide them from everyone (which I would think is a good idea).  I mean, you run into a problem with another player on Roblox and all of a sudden they are giving your grief on Twitter and Instagram too.

Since users can create their own worlds in Roblox it is hard to monitor what exactly happens in all those worlds... some worlds may have things you don't want your son/daughter to see so be vigilant and report anything inappropriate.  

In my opinion, out of the games and social media platforms that I have reviewed so far (WhatsApp, Twitter, FortNite, SnapChat, Instagram, and YouTube).  This one seems like it could be (and I could definitely be wrong having never played it before) the most innocent. Likely not perfect, but if I had a child or student begging me to play or be on SOMETHING and I had to choose one thing... this would be it (so far).

Last week I talked about WhatsApp