Beyond Age-Based Restrictions: Rethinking Children's Online Safety Through Comparing Parent-Child Perspectives of Risks in User-Generated Content Games

Existing HCI literature on the benefits and risks of User-Generated Content (UGC) games for children often focuses on either parents’ or child players’ views. Bridging these perspectives is critical for identifying the alignment or divergence between children’s and parents’ concerns, which provides a more comprehensive image of challenges and opportunities children face in these games. Through a mixed-method content analysis of 2000 reviews about Roblox (one of the most popular UGC platforms) from both parents and children, we identify six key risks children face and investigate how parents’ and children’s focuses on different risks may shift across age groups. We also propose design recommendations for advancing trust and safety initiatives on UGC platforms by considering children, parents, and developers as key stakeholders. We contribute to rethinking more nuanced safety models for protecting children that are developmentally responsive and context-sensitive, rather than relying on age-based thresholds (e.g., under-13 vs. 13+).