Nearly 40 million kids under 13 open Roblox every single day. Let that sit for a second. That’s roughly the entire child population of California, all logged into one platform, building things, chatting with users they don’t know, and wandering through worlds their parents have probably never seen.

Any family that’s watched their 8-year-old vanish into Roblox on a Saturday morning knows the feeling. The platform’s had a rough track record on safety, facing real criticism for exposing young users to explicit content and, worse, making kids reachable by adults who shouldn’t be anywhere near them. Now Roblox is making structural changes, and if your kids use it, you need to know what’s coming.

Starting in early June, Roblox will roll out two new account types built around age ranges. The first, called Roblox Kids, covers children ages 5 to 8. The second, Roblox Select, is designed for users ages 9 to 15. This isn’t a minor settings adjustment. It’s a rearchitecting of how the platform treats its youngest users.

Roblox Kids accounts restrict children to games carrying only Minimal or Mild content maturity ratings, drawn from what the company describes as a “dynamically updated catalog” of thousands of approved titles. Chat is disabled by default. For parents of kindergartners and early elementary kids, that default-off chat alone is the headline.

Roblox Select opens things up some. Kids in the 9 to 15 bracket can access content rated up to Moderate, and some chat features may be switched on by default. But parents can go into the Roblox parental controls webpage at any point and shut down chat entirely, regardless of which account category their child falls into. That option doesn’t disappear based on age tier.

“Parents can customize these settings at any time,” a Roblox spokesperson told Scary Mommy, underscoring that the controls are designed to flex around what individual families actually need rather than locking everyone into the same box.

If your child has already gone through Roblox’s age verification process, the platform will drop them into the correct account type when June hits. As they get older, the account category shifts automatically. You don’t have to do anything extra, though it’s worth logging into the parental controls page after rollout just to confirm everything landed where it should.

The expanded controls are where parents will find the most practical day-to-day value. Roblox is now letting parents block specific individual games, not just broad content categories. That’s a meaningful difference. If your kid’s whole friend group is obsessed with something you’ve decided doesn’t fit your family, you can pull that one game without touching anything else. Worth noting for parents who’ve felt the controls were too blunt in the past.

The reverse works too. A game sitting just outside your child’s default content rating can be manually approved if you’ve looked it over and decided it’s actually fine. The system recognizes that parents know their kids, and algorithms don’t. That’s the right instinct.

Direct message management gets a real upgrade here as well. Parents can control their child’s direct chat settings all the way up until the child turns 16. Given that the platform’s most serious safety failures have often run through direct messaging, that extended window of parental oversight matters more than it might sound.

For context on what those content ratings actually mean, ESRB ratings offer a useful baseline, though Roblox operates its own internal maturity system. Minimal and Mild are the lower tiers. Moderate sits in the middle. Understanding the difference matters when you’re deciding whether to expand your 13-year-old’s access or keep tighter limits in place.

None of this makes Roblox a fully locked-down environment. Kids will still find ways around things, and no parental control system is airtight. But the move toward age-specific account structures, combined with per-game blocking and extended direct chat oversight up to age 16, represents a genuinely more useful toolkit than what parents had before. The question now is whether families actually use it. Direct chat disabled. One specific game blocked. Five minutes in the settings. That’s where it starts.