When Akshay Chaudhary’s 8-year-old daughter, Avni, started playing Roblox, it looked like the safest possible kind of screen time. Cartoon avatars. Bright colors. A game full of other kids building things together.
Then Avni mentioned, casually, that another player kept asking her to be his “Roblox girlfriend” and was trying to move the conversation off the platform. She thought it was silly. Her father did not.
Soon after, a charge appeared on Chaudhary’s card. Avni had clicked on Robux, the game’s virtual currency, without realizing it was real money.
“Roblox is not just a game. It’s a social platform dressed up as one,” Chaudhary said. “The risk for younger kids, especially under 10, is that they often can’t tell the difference between roleplay, manipulation and grooming behavior.”
Chaudhary is not alone in his concern. To find out which apps worry the people who study this issue for a living, HuffPost asked child safety experts, cybersecurity specialists, pediatric clinicians and psychologists which apps they would never let their own kids or grandkids use without serious guardrails.
Two apps came up every time. The first was Roblox.
The most consistent thing experts said was that parents don’t understand what Roblox actually is.
“It’s an open platform with real-time chat, private messaging, virtual currency and millions of unvetted user-generated experiences,” said Paul Pioselli, a former Fortune 20 chief information security officer. “That combination creates significant risk for kids.”
Pioselli is most concerned about children under 13. So is Ashley Poklar, a child and adolescent psychologist, parent and clinical director of the anti-child-trafficking organization Sentinel Foundation. She narrows the danger zone to ages 7 to 12 when children are old enough to navigate independently but not yet old enough to recognize when something is off.
“Children ages 7 to 12 often have a hard time separating the game persona from the person they are interacting with,” she said. Open chat, friend requests from strangers, private servers and in-game rewards combine to give predators what they need to “manipulate your child into keeping secrets, sharing personal information, engaging in private messaging, or moving to a different platform.”
That migration off-platform is exactly what happened to Avni. It is also what experts say is the hardest behavior to catch from outside. The interactions look, to a parent glancing at the screen, like ordinary play.
Roblox has tried to address it. In January 2026, after a wave of lawsuits, the company rolled out mandatory facial age estimation for anyone who wants to use chat. Users are sorted into one of six age brackets and can chat only with their own and the brackets immediately above and below. Roblox calls it the gold standard for communication safety.
In practice, Pioselli said, some parents are undermining it. “Parents are often completing the scans on behalf of their children, causing the Roblox system to flag minors as adults (21+) with full social visibility,” he said.
But even strict parents aren’t fully protected. Within days of the rollout, age-verified accounts were appearing on resale sites for as little as $5.
A Roblox spokesperson told HuffPost that “if a parent mistakenly completes the age check on behalf of their child, the parent can correct their child’s age using their parent-linked account.”
The company said it monitors user behavioral signals and may prompt users to age-check again or revoke age checks for accounts suspected of changing hands if it detects signs that a user’s behavior does not match their verified age.
“Roblox expressly prohibits the buying, selling or trading of accounts and we take action against accounts found to violate our rules,” the spokesperson said.
On spending, the spokesperson said: “At the first purchase, we display clear warnings that the transaction involves real money and alert parents via email about high spend.” Roblox also noted that in June it is rolling out new Roblox Kids and Roblox Select accounts globally, with chat disabled by default for Roblox Kids accounts ages 5 to 8.
The second app experts named was YouTube. But unlike Roblox, the risk isn’t strangers reaching your child ― it’s the algorithm.
YouTube’s recommendation engine optimizes for engagement. In practice, this means whatever keeps a viewer watching.
Poklar warned that the algorithm “tends to push them toward progressively more sexualized, violent, manipulative and extremist content” because emotionally charged videos earn the most views and rise as a result. A child can start with a cartoon and end up somewhere unrecognizable inside 30 minutes.
For very young children, Pioselli said, the new front in this battle is what he called “AI slop: ultra-stimulating videos mimicking educational content that slip past filters on a large scale.”
For older kids, the algorithm’s pull becomes more personal. “A single fitness or diet search can trigger a self-reinforcing loop of body comparison and disordered eating content,” he said. A teenager doesn’t have to search for harm, but the system finds it anyway.
Kiara DeWitt, a certified pediatric neurology nurse and head of clinical operations at Medical Director Co., sees the fallout in the clinic before parents do. “Morning grumpiness after screen time, fighting bedtimes or decreased interest in playing away from the screen are red flags that were often early indicators for me,” she said. “These are often things that pediatric clinicians catch before parents make the connection to devices.”
When asked about these concerns, YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon said the company’s systems “are designed to automatically intervene to break negative viewing loops for sensitive content categories that could be problematic if viewed repeatedly, like content about physical comparison.” Malon also pointed to YouTube Kids as a separate, contained environment for younger viewers, and said supervised accounts for older children allow parents to set daily time limits and turn off features like Shorts entirely.
DeWitt’s framing for parents is to treat these apps the way you would treat taking a child to Disney World. “You want to know who is in the room with your child, where the exits are and when it’s time to say goodbye for the day.”
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So what should parents and grandparents actually do?
On Roblox, the experts converged on a short list. Link a parent account to your child’s. Enable Account Restrictions, set Content Maturity, turn chat off and add a parent PIN. Remove stored payment methods from the device and lock down Robux purchases, which DeWitt said “can add up to $50 plus without you realizing it.” Restrict contact to Friends Only and complete the facial age check honestly using your child’s face, not your own.
Ryan Egan, a clinical psychologist who works with children and families, said the single most useful thing a parent can do is know which game inside Roblox their child is actually playing. “If your child says Roblox is their favorite game, always ask: which game in Roblox?” he said. “Especially for children under 10.” Then sit down and play it with them.
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Your single best asset as a parent is knowing the game your child is playing or the YouTube channel your child is watching. There’s no substitute for simply playing the game yourself or watching the videos yourself.
– Ryan Egan, clinical psychologist
For YouTube, the practical steps are smaller and more boring, which DeWitt said is exactly why parents skip them. Keep children under 10 on YouTube Kids rather than the main app. Switch off autoplay in Family Center. Use the built-in 60-minute timer and cap sessions at 20 to 30 minutes.
Egan recommended building a whitelist of approved content rather than chasing problems after the fact. “Whitelisting appropriate content is a much better tactic than blacklisting inappropriate content, particularly for large platforms like YouTube and Roblox,” he said. “Your single best asset as a parent is knowing the game your child is playing or the YouTube channel your child is watching. There’s no substitute for simply playing the game yourself or watching the videos yourself. Treat it like a bonding opportunity: Get to know your children’s virtual worlds, and you will be much better equipped when setting reasonable expectations.”
Settings and whitelists matter, but every expert pointed to something no platform can provide. “A positive, trusting and strong relationship with an adult is the single best prevention tool a child can have,” Poklar said. “Reacting to small situations calmly, not taking their phone, will lead to more honesty later.”
That is the part no app can do for you.
This story has been updated to include comment from YouTube.
