The Multimillion Dollar Game Raising Your Children: Parents Are You Watching?

Welcome to modern day, a time where technology and mental health go hand in hand. One year olds are placed in front of screens when parents can’t calm or entertain their child. Five and older lie on family couches, eyes glued to the tablets that they just got for Christmas. What are they looking at? The user-friendly game known as Roblox, of course, a place where there is a game for everything. Roblox, like many platforms built for kids, is marketed as safe, but beneath the surface, there’s a danger now common accross the online gaming industry. As younger and younger ages flock to this game, online predators are using it as a hunting ground for exploiting children. 

Do you remember the games you played as a kid? Spending hours with your friends on Minecraft, crying over jumpscares in the Five Nights At Freddies series… Maybe you were also playing Roblox, where users — including adults — can create and play games accessible to young children. Times of simple gaming are over. We now live in a time where a child’s engagement can generate millions in revenue. It’s time to stop putting our children in the hands of cold-hearted companies who think more about the green in their hands than the kids whose lives are also in their hands. Parents need to take their children back!

According to NBC News, in the last year Roblox has taken action by establishing new policies and restrictions to protect its younger users, the following being moderating the live texting within Roblox as well as giving parents control to know what their children are doing. Despite these efforts, stories of children being exploited on platforms like Roblox remains all too common.  

Roblox claims it uses AI moderation, age verification, and parental locks — but is that truly enough? If a computer code is the only thing watching children as they make the worst decisions of their lives, are they really safe? We spend so much time worrying about these companies that sometimes we forget to think about the actual victims, the stories and experiences they’ve had that may never fully heal. 

A youtuber named Schlep has dedicated his channel to going on Roblox and catching these horrible predetory individuals, exposing them to the world and exposing Roblox’s negligence in solving such a prominent issue. In one his videos, he recounts the whole process of catching one of the many predators roaming the site, from illicit messages and photos he has seen and shown it all. When all this evidence is presented to the Roblox company, they ignore it and don’t take the necessary actions to making sure it doesn’t happen again. This reflects a wider trend among online platforms for children, where safety measures often lag behind real threats. Although there are some cases where they do take these necessary actions, it’s only under specific circumstances like being called out publicly by a lot of people. Schlep explains in another video, that many of the predators he’s catched in previous videos still have Roblox accounts! Roblox gave no repercussions to people who are convicted felons. It wasn’t until they were put on the news Roblox decided to take action, albeit the bare minimum. 

As with many tech companies facing scrutiny, Roblox denies these accusations. It can come as a surprise to know how much they put aside when it’s concerning child safety. Chicago 5 has shown that more than half of Roblox’s demographic are under the age of 17.  Lawyers with under-age clients recount stories where children faced the consequence of Roblox’s shortcomings. In one case, a 13 year old was groomed and kidnapped by an adult that she met on Roblox. Many others have a similar story. 

Though in modern times these adult-child relationships are known to be wrong, there was a time when it was a disturbingly common occurrence, due to the normalcy of arranged marriages (sending off your daughters to a grown man to keep the bloodline strong.) Despite growing awareness, these horrible relationships have evolved with the times. With the prominence of the internet, predators no longer hide in the shadows, they show themselves proud behind the screens, and millions of online communities take pleasure in the sport. Companies show no care unless served a lawsuit. This problem grows with the rise of the digital age. We have to hold people and platforms accountable before today’s children only fall into more traps, willingly and unknowingly.

This is more than just Roblox, company policies, or even something as simple as bittersweet nostalgia for good games we loved in  their primes. This is about the kids of today. The kids who will never know what it’s like to play at the park without a care in the world, to pick worms in the dirt after it rains because why not? Their whole lives are consumed by a screen that wants nothing more than to sell them the newest, shiniest toy, or manipulate them to spend mommy and daddy’s money in-game because “it looks cool!” Adults don’t need to eradicate technology from the earth, because we live in an era where we can’t go back on a discovery that is already rooted in our lives for now and for years to come. However, we don’t need to place all the burdens of technology onto kids. I remember as a kid I played with the movie-character dolls, sang to silly songs, and read the books. I was not a very outdoorsy kid at all, but it was enough, I have a childhood I can look back on without thinking about a device. I didn’t even have devices with internet access until middle school. Please, all I’m asking is that we give kids a childhood they don’t even know they need, to give them something that will fill them with everything that makes a kid a kid.