It can take minutes, not months: a child starts a new account in a popular game, a stranger sends a friendly message claiming to be the same age, and before long there’s an invitation to move the chat to Discord or another app with fewer protections. Often nothing bad happens, but it’s the kind of near miss that makes keeping kids safe in online games feel less like a settings menu and more like an ongoing job.
We get asked about this a lot, usually by parents who don’t play games themselves and feel like they’re arriving halfway through a match with no map. Fair enough. The honest answer is that there’s no single toggle that fixes it, but there’s a decent set of tools across PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo and PC that, used together, get you most of the way there. Our take is that most families are under-using features they already own, rather than needing to buy anything new.
Why online games are different to the old-school console
Back when a console just played discs, the worst-case scenario was your kid seeing a cutscene they shouldn’t. Now almost every popular game, Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, Call of Duty, EA FC, is a live service with voice chat, text chat, friend requests and in-game purchases layered over the top. The game itself might be rated for a younger audience while the community around it absolutely isn’t.
That’s the bit a lot of parents miss. A game can carry a green classification sticker and still put your ten-year-old in a voice lobby with adults. Voice chat is the single biggest risk multiplier here, more than violence or language in the game’s actual content, because it’s unmoderated and happens in real time. We’d argue classification boards do a reasonable job rating the game; they can’t rate the strangers playing it with your kid tonight.
Start with the classification, not just the vibe
Australia’s classification system, run through the Australian Classification Board process that applies to games sold here, is a genuinely useful first filter and it’s one that a lot of households skip because the kid already has strong opinions about what they’re entitled to play. PEGI and ESRB ratings on the box or store page tell you about violence, language and simulated gambling mechanics. They don’t tell you whether the online community attached to that title is well moderated, which is really the second half of the question.
We’d treat the rating as the floor, not the ceiling. A PG game with open voice chat and a loot box economy can be a worse experience for an eight-year-old than an M-rated single-player game with no online component at all. That’s the mildly unpopular opinion in our house: classification stickers matter less than most parents assume, and the chat settings matter more.
Setting up each platform’s parental controls
Every major platform has built genuinely decent parental or family controls over the last few years. The problem isn’t that they don’t exist, it’s that almost nobody sets them up during the initial console setup when they’d take five minutes, and then it feels like a chore later.
- On PlayStation, a family manager account lets you set playtime limits, restrict communication to friends only or turn it off entirely, and cap spending with a monthly limit tied to a card or PlayStation wallet balance.
- On Xbox, Microsoft’s family settings let you filter content by age rating, block or allow specific games individually, and set “ask a parent” requests for purchases, which in our experience is the single most useful feature because it stops impulse buys without banning the kid from buying anything ever.
- On Nintendo Switch, the separate Nintendo Switch Parental Controls app on your phone is clunkier to find but does the job, including daily play limits and the ability to switch off posting to social media from in-game.
None of these are perfect. The PlayStation family manager flow in particular buries some settings two or three menus deeper than it should, and we reckon that’s a genuine design miss rather than a safety feature working as intended. But once it’s set up, it mostly runs itself.
Voice chat and the stranger problem
If we had to pick one setting to get right above all others, it’s who your kid can hear and who can hear them. Fortnite, Roblox and Call of Duty all default new accounts into fairly permissive chat settings in open lobbies, meaning your ten-year-old can end up voice chatting with an adult stranger on their first session unless you’ve gone in and locked it to friends-only or muted it entirely.
Text chat filters exist too and catch a reasonable amount of obvious profanity, but they’re easily beaten by kids and adults alike using deliberate misspellings, so treat them as a speed bump rather than a wall.
Roblox in particular has copped scrutiny overseas for how easily younger accounts could be contacted by strangers, and the platform has made changes in response, including age-estimation technology and tighter default chat restrictions for under-13 accounts. Worth checking those settings directly in the app rather than assuming the defaults are protective enough for your household.
The money side: loot boxes and in-game spending
This is where we see the most actual financial damage done, more than any stranger-danger scenario. A kid with a saved card on a Nintendo or Xbox account can run up genuine money inside a game designed specifically to encourage “just one more pack” purchases. Loot boxes and similar randomised reward mechanics have been the subject of ongoing scrutiny from regulators internationally, and the ACCC has flagged in-game purchasing and loot box mechanics as consumer issues worth watching under Australian Consumer Law, particularly around transparency of odds and whether kids understand what they’re actually buying.
Our practical fix is boring but it works: unlink the saved card, use prepaid gift cards or store credit for anything optional, and turn on purchase approval requests at the platform level. If your household runs on a family plan through one of the major telcos, it’s also worth checking whether app store purchases are routed to the account holder’s bill, because that’s a second leak a lot of families forget about until the statement arrives.
Talking to your kid without sounding like a lecture
Settings only get you so far. The conversation matters more, and the best version of it isn’t a sit-down lecture, it’s small and repeated: who are you playing with tonight, is that someone from school or someone you met in the lobby, and what would you do if someone asked you to move the chat to a different app. That last one is the real tell. Groomers and scammers alike try to move kids off the monitored platform and onto something like Discord or Snapchat specifically because it’s harder for parents to see.
The eSafety Commissioner publishes age-specific guidance on exactly this, and it’s worth a read even if you think you’ve got the basics covered, because the advice changes as platforms do. Since the social media minimum age of 16 came into force on 10 December 2025, there’s also a flow-on effect worth knowing about: some kids are pushed toward gaming platforms with social features, like Roblox or Fortnite’s Party Hub, as a workaround, which means the same scrutiny you’d apply to a social app now needs to apply to the gaming platform too.
What this looks like on PC specifically
Console ecosystems are relatively contained. PC is messier, because a kid with their own Windows account, a Steam library and a Discord install is operating across three or four separate sets of settings with no single family dashboard tying them together. Windows family safety settings can apply screen time limits and content filtering at the OS level, Steam has its own family view and playtime controls, and Discord has safety settings buried in user preferences that are off by default for server invites from strangers in some configurations.
If your household is building or buying a family PC for gaming, it’s worth reading our realistic gaming PC build guide before you commit to specs, because a shared family machine behaves differently to a personal rig than managing multiple accounts and parental profiles cleanly.
We’d also say this: don’t assume a Nintendo Switch is automatically safer than a gaming PC just because it looks like a toy. Online multiplayer is online multiplayer regardless of the plastic it’s wrapped in, and we’ve seen more than one parent relax entirely because the console is “just for kids games”, only to find the same voice chat and friend request mechanics running underneath.
Our verdict on keeping kids safe in online games
If we’re being completely honest, the families who do this well aren’t the ones with the most restrictive settings, they’re the ones who treat it like ongoing maintenance rather than a one-off setup. Spend the twenty minutes properly configuring family accounts on whichever platform your kid actually plays on, lock chat to friends-only as the default and loosen it deliberately rather than the other way around, strip saved cards off kid-facing accounts, and keep the conversation casual and frequent rather than a single big talk.
None of this is about killing the fun either. A ten-year-old playing Fortnite with two mates from school, voice chat locked to friends-only, spending limit in place, is having a genuinely great time and there’s nothing wrong with that picture. The goal was never to lock the game down so hard it stops being fun, it’s to make sure the only people in the lobby are the ones your kid actually chose to be there with.
For the regulatory side, including how the eSafety Commissioner’s reporting tools work if something does go wrong, it’s worth bookmarking our breakdown of Australia’s social media age restriction laws, since a lot of the same reporting mechanisms apply to gaming platforms with chat and social features. And if your kid is asking for new hardware as part of all this, our rundown on whether the PS5 Pro upgrade is worth it covers whether the family controls differ meaningfully between the two consoles, which, spoiler, they mostly don’t.
— *Josh Tannenbaum, Gaming Writer, Tech Geek*
Featured image: AI-generated illustration.
