My kid sold his soul to… Roblox

This is the main social outlet for my daughter, and I’m not going to deprive her of it.

I made a deal with the devil this summer. In fact, with many devils, if you bring accurate accounting. But only one of them hangs like a heavy burden on my soul, and its name is Roblox. Cause my kid sold soul to it.

I’ve never liked video games. Not for myself, not for my daughter. I don’t strictly monitor my screen time, but I still hoped to keep my daughter as far away from this addictive, narcotic world of computer games as possible.

Bam! Pandemic.

When that dilapidated laptop that I allowed my daughter to use for distance learning breathed its last, I took a fatal step. I bought her an iPad, on the pretext that it would serve as her portable computer for years to come. Sometime in the very recent past, I myself, in my own voice, said: who even comes up with the idea to spend that kind of money on a children’s gadget? If I could now go back to the past, I would find these words and swallow them back without water and salt.

Everyone repeats in chorus after me:

Don’t worry!
Don’t promise!
Otherwise it will happen to you!

Before we had an iPad, I had never heard of Roblox. I thought it was something like Minecraft (another game I don’t know anything about). Actually, even now I don’t really know what kind of Roblox it really is.

As far as I can see, this is not so much a game as a game universe. Players choose avatars for themselves and advance them through rather ugly landscapes through various obstacles, collecting skills, objects and animals along the way.

A parent who hasn’t sat at the head of their child crying inconsolably because some virtual scammer stole his kitsune hasn’t truly experienced what it’s like to be a parent during a pandemic.

Can I spend real money in this game? And how! My friend in California banned his son from using Roblox after the boy spent $700 in total on in-app purchases.

Roblox is so devilishly attractive because it is a multiplayer gaming universe. When the real world ceased to be a place where children can go out and meet friends, the digital world naturally took an empty holy place.

My daughter is close friends with a 10-year-old neighbor from the top floor, he introduced her to all this. They played for hours together, but separated by the same floor. It turned out that a bunch of other friends of the daughter also hang out on this platform. Well, then she figured out how to use facetime to chat with friends while playing.

How could I take away this social outlet from her at a time when she was deprived of her usual communication with her comrades? I didn’t want to act like a monster. But I won’t pretend that I let her do it just for her sake. Of course not, I did it for myself as well.

Roblox has become a nanny, a company, and a children’s camp at the same time. I used to perceive it more as a place where she goes, rather than an occupation. She spent happy hours playing games, and all I heard was screams: “Teleport! Teleport to me!” I can’t say that while she was playing, I redid a bunch of things, but still I managed to do something. Get back to work. A little bit of housework. Or surf the net a little as a gloomy shadow.

Unconsciously, I knew that the time would come when I would lose the child I knew so well. That this little girl will become a teenage girl, clumsy, full of nastiness, which she will use as fuel for a rocket that will take her out of my orbit. But now my daughter is about to turn 8 years old. It seemed to me that I had more time, and I never thought that I would pour fuel into the tank of this rocket with my own hands.

I watched her enter this new world, taking on new guises, new avatars. I watch my kid sold soul to roblox. How skillfully she maneuvers in a space in which I am completely out of my depth. When I tried to play with her, she wrote in the game chat: “Mom! Mom, follow me! My mom is a terrible player and I try to teach her, but she’s still a great mom!”

Of course, I was pleased that she was trying to soften the blow, but to tell the truth, I’m not a great mother at all. I let my daughter slip away from me into the two-dimensional world because, in the depths of my summer sorrows and stupor, I could barely connect two words, let alone stir up funny virtual daughter-mothers.

Generally speaking, it irritates me terribly when parents (yes, mothers, mothers, it’s always mothers) say that they can’t cope as parents, as if this is a competition or a job for which you should be awarded the Order of Labor Glory. But I suddenly realized that I was not as bad at parenting as my daughter let me down.

The closer we get to the start of school (what a meaningful and vague phrase at the same time, huh?), the more things will change here. This summer, I felt like a bee stuck in honey. Of course, I’m depressed, but you all are not, or what? But how can I bring her back to reality if I can’t bring myself back there.

On one of the beautiful last days of the golden summer, my daughter and I met with a neighbor’s family from the top floor on the beach. And my daughter played real games with their son in the real world, and they splashed in the waves like fur seals, yelling with joy. This boy is older and a better swimmer, and he jumped fearlessly into the water. But at the same time, he looked after my daughter and helped her navigate the surf much better than I could.

This friendship began in the shadow of computer programs, but it has blossomed in the real world too. And it feels so right, so whole. And gives me hope that maybe, despite my parental weaknesses and failures, for my daughter, all this is not so bad.

Author: Emily Flake
Acknowledgement: Jackie Ferrentino
Free translation: Natalia Zhigileva

If you, like the author of this story, are worried about how your child managed to get lost in the virtual reality, come to the online workshop “Children on the Phone”.

Whether the gadget will be a friend, ally and assistant in upbringing, development and education depends on whether we can teach children how to use it.

What do you need for this?

• To be able to choose useful content.
• To be able to consume content in a productive mode for the brain.
• To be able to independently regulate the time spent behind the screen.

It is these three skills that need to be helped to develop a child in order to trust him with a calm heart to interact with any electronic device.

To practice these issues and analyze individual situations, we go to the online workshop “Children on the Phone”.

Together with Natalia Romanova-Afrikantova, we will analyze dozens of the most pressing issues, including such→

• How much time children can spend online by age.
• How to choose apps for a child’s gadget.
• How to implement self-management of screen time step by step.
• How to overcome obstacles and solve problems that arise in the process of mastering self-regulation in relationships with gadgets.
• What are the signs of addiction and how to deal with it? How to learn to recognize dangerous situations at an early stage: cyberbullying, pedophilia, Internet scams, offers of illegal work – and talk about these pitfalls with children?