Navigating parental concerns in children’s engagement with roblox – a multi-method analysis of emotional and thematic patterns across online communities

Abstract

This study examines how parents engage with and make sense of their children’s experiences on Roblox, one of the most widely used online gaming platforms for children. Drawing on Reddit comments from three parenting-related communities (r/Parenting, r/internetparents, and r/roblox), the study employs a multi-method approach that integrates BERTopic for thematic modeling, NRC-based sentiment analysis, and Leximancer for conceptual mapping. The analysis identified six major areas of concern: digital safety (24.5%), screen-time management (18.3%), emotional well-being (17.1%), financial exposure (15.2%), social interaction risks (13.6%), and parenting strategies (11.3%). Sentiment analysis showed that fear and anger dominated risk-focused discussions, whereas trust and joy appeared more frequently in collaborative or solution-oriented narratives. Semantic mapping further confirmed the co-occurrence of key concerns—such as “trust,” “moderation,” and “spending”—illustrating the emotional and conceptual entanglement underlying parental anxieties. The findings highlight the emotional ambivalence of digital parenting, as parents oscillate between restrictive caution and adaptive engagement. While the study contributes to parental mediation theory by emphasizing emotion-laden discourse, it also acknowledges methodological limitations, including unverifiable user identities, lack of demographic metadata, and limited behavioral generalizability. This research advances understanding of digital parenting as a complex, emotionally negotiated practice. It calls for improved platform transparency, the development of family-oriented co-engagement tools, and greater ethical sensitivity in social media–based research involving children. Such tools may include shared dashboards, co-play modes, and parent–child learning features that foster joint exploration.

Introduction

The digital landscape presents both expansive opportunities and critical challenges for children’s development, particularly in virtual environments like Roblox, a user-generated gaming and social platform with more than 380 million active users worldwide [1]. Roblox allows children to create, socialize, and trade virtual items, but also exposes them to commercialized play, peer interaction risks, and algorithmically moderated spaces. As immersive platforms become embedded in children's everyday lives, concerns around safety, behavioral influence, and emotional well-being have intensified, particularly from the perspective of parents [2]. The complexity of navigating digital parenting is exacerbated by a widespread knowledge gap among parents concerning how these platforms function and what risks they pose [3]. This disconnect can lead to increased anxiety and the adoption of restrictive or heavily monitored strategies, often without a full understanding of their implications for children’s autonomy and digital literacy [4, 5].

The issue extends beyond individual family units. From a bioecological perspective, digital parenting is embedded in a network of systems—ranging from immediate familial interactions to broader social, media, and policy environments—that collectively shape children’s digital experiences [6]. Addressing risks such as cyberbullying, online exploitation, and harmful content exposure requires a coordinated effort involving not just parents but also educators, platform developers, and advocacy organizations [7, 8]. Within this ecosystem, Roblox represents a prototypical case of “hybrid play” where creativity and risk co-exist, making it an analytically rich site for studying parental negotiation and trust. While platforms like Roblox offer opportunities for creativity and peer interaction, they also introduce concerns around content moderation, in-game spending, and the design of social communication systems [9, 10]. Parents often find themselves overwhelmed by these rapidly evolving environments, struggling to reconcile their protective instincts with their children’s desire for autonomy and digital exploration [11, 12].

Existing research has examined general parental attitudes toward children's digital media use; however, little is known about how parents articulate these experiences within platform-specific, peer-to-peer environments. Reddit provides a unique lens because it hosts multiple communities differing in focus and digital fluency. In this study, we deliberately analyze three distinct subreddits—r/Parenting (general, broad-spectrum parental discourse), r/internetparents (digitally engaged caregivers), and r/roblox (platform-embedded discussions)—to capture a continuum from generic to platform-specific parental engagement. This design enables comparative insight into how digital literacy, proximity to the platform, and community norms shape emotional tone and thematic emphasis. The need to examine both the thematic content and the emotional texture of such discourse is pressing, particularly as digital platforms become increasingly participatory and socially complex [13, 14]. Accordingly, “parental concerns” in this study are defined not merely as fear-based reactions but as discursive expressions addressing children’s digital behaviors, safety, or well-being—spanning negative, neutral, and positive tones. A more granular understanding of how parents respond to platform design, risk perception, and emotional impact can inform more targeted safety tools, parental education, and child-centric policy development.

This study addresses these gaps by analyzing large-scale parental discourse on Roblox across three distinct Reddit communities. The study is guided by two research questions:

• RQ1: What are the primary concerns expressed by parents regarding their children's engagement with Roblox?

• RQ2: How do parental sentiments vary across different online communities discussing Roblox and digital parenting, and what does this variation reveal about differing digital-parenting orientations?

To answer these questions, we employ a multi-method analytical framework that combines BERTopic for topic modeling, emotion-intensity analysis using the NRC Emotion Lexicon, and Leximancer-based semantic co-occurrence mapping. By examining both the thematic and affective dimensions of digital parenting discourse, this study offers a more nuanced understanding of parental mediation in contemporary digital environments. The comparative design across communities allows us to move beyond simple sentiment description toward identifying how community culture and digital proximity influence emotional framing. The originality of this research lies in its cross-community comparison, platform-specific focus, and integration of emotional analysis into the study of digital parenting practices.

Literature review

Evolving parental mediation strategies in the digital age

Digital parenting encompasses a continuum of strategies that parents adopt to supervise, guide, and engage with their children's digital experiences. Building upon parental mediation theory [15], traditional categories of restrictive, active, and co-use mediation have evolved to accommodate the complexities of immersive and socially networked environments such as Roblox [16, 17]. These strategies are deeply influenced by children's developmental stages, parents’ digital literacy, and cultural norms [18].Understanding these shifting strategies provides the theoretical basis for comparing discourse across different online communities, where variations in mediation style often correspond to differences in emotional tone and technological familiarity.

Active mediation, which involves co-use, open dialogue, and contextual discussion, is increasingly associated with improved digital outcomes for children. It enhances critical thinking, fosters responsible behavior, and strengthens parent–child bonds through joint engagement [19, 20]. Conversely, restrictive mediation, which includes setting screen time limits and controlling content access, may offer immediate protection but risks stifling autonomy and experiential learning [4]. Importantly, effective digital parenting is not static—it must evolve with the child’s maturity and adapt to changing technologies [21]. Reflective, digitally literate parents are better positioned to balance protection with empowerment, modeling resilience and proactively addressing online risks such as cyberbullying [22]. In this regard, platforms like Reddit have emerged as dynamic arenas where parents co-develop strategies, share coping mechanisms, and collectively navigate digital uncertainties [13].

Emotional ambivalence and affective complexity in digital parenting

Parental responses to children’s digital lives are often characterized by emotional ambivalence—the coexistence of fear, anger, and frustration alongside curiosity, joy, and trust. Roblox, as both a social and creative platform, heightens this duality by offering children opportunities for self-expression while simultaneously introducing emotional, financial, and behavioral risks [2, 23]. These emotional contradictions form the rationale for RQ2: examining how different communities balance protective and adaptive emotions in their discourse reveals how digital parenting identities are negotiated online. To uncover these dynamics, this study employed multidimensional sentiment and emotion analysis techniques. Standard polarity models are insufficient to capture the emotional nuance found in online parenting communities [24]. Instead, more refined tools reveal how digital parenting constitutes a form of affective labor—a concept first introduced by Hochschild [25] to describe the management of feelings as a form of interpersonal work, and later extended by Jarrett [26] to digital media contexts where care, communication, and emotional regulation blend with online domestic labor. Within this framework, affective labor in digital parenting refers to the ongoing emotional management parents perform both for and through digital technologies, encompassing efforts to monitor children’s safety, maintain trust, and nurture autonomy in environments like Roblox. This form of emotional work extends beyond spontaneous reactions to deliberate relational practices, through which parents transform fear, frustration, and affection into mechanisms of resilience and connection. Emotional discourse on Reddit makes this visible: expressions of anger frequently accompany discussions on digital safety, while trust and joy surface in accounts of co-play and shared discovery. Such ambivalent affective expressions underscore that contemporary parenting involves not only control or consent but a continuous emotional negotiation between anxiety and optimism, vigilance and empathy, protection and co-exploration [6, 27].

Emotional and thematic patterns in online communities

Digital parenting discourse in online platforms like Reddit reveals recurring emotional and thematic patterns that reflect the psychological, social, and behavioral dimensions of contemporary parenthood. Key topics—such as cyberbullying, exposure to inappropriate content, screen time conflict, and financial vulnerability—are frequently accompanied by emotional expressions of anxiety, fatigue, and frustration [28, 29]. At the same time, themes of creativity, bonding, and learning recur in discussions marked by hope, trust, and pride [30]. These patterns are not simply reflections of individual attitudes,they represent collective meaning-making and peer-supported adaptation. Online communities thus operate as informal knowledge systems, supplementing traditional sources like parenting blogs or school communications [3, 31]. By analyzing these discourses, researchers can better understand the affective and cognitive undercurrents shaping digital parenting norms and behaviors.

Platform governance and ınfrastructural trust

An increasingly significant yet underexplored dimension of digital parenting is platform governance—the constellation of moderation policies, algorithmic systems, and safety infrastructures that mediate children’s online experiences. Parents today evaluate not only their child’s behavior but also the trustworthiness of the platform’s infrastructure, meaning the perceived transparency, reliability, and accountability of its technical and organizational systems [9]. On Roblox, for instance, persistent concerns about unmoderated chat rooms, in-game purchases, and anonymous interactions raise deeper questions about algorithmic transparency, policy enforcement, and infrastructural trust—a form of confidence not placed in individuals, but in the underlying digital architectures and governance processes that structure participation and safety [32, 33].

These anxieties signal a broader shift from household-based control toward platform-embedded parenting, in which parental mediation extends into monitoring and interpreting the governance mechanisms of digital ecosystems. Recognizing the platform as an active actor within the parenting ecology reframes digital parenting from a model of private responsibility to a distributed trust system, involving platform designers, moderators, and policymakers as co-stewards of children’s well-being. This view aligns with emerging scholarship emphasizing system-level accountability and the need to equip parents not only with technical tools, but also with institutional support and critical digital literacy to navigate complex algorithmic environments [18, 34].

Bridging the gap: toward collaborative support systems

Recent research emphasizes that effective digital parenting benefits from collaborative support networks that extend beyond the family unit. Schools, educators, mental health professionals, and community organizations play complementary roles in promoting digital literacy, emotional resilience, and ethical technology use [22, 35]. Educational interventions such as webinars, parent–teacher workshops, and peer-led discussion forums have been found to strengthen parents’ confidence in managing children’s online activities while encouraging balanced autonomy [36]. Likewise, community-based initiatives, including counseling and digital awareness programs, can provide parents with context-specific resources and coping strategies [37].

From this perspective, digital parenting is increasingly approached as an ecosystemic process, where institutional, technological, and interpersonal layers intersect. Rather than framing parental mediation as an isolated act of control, recent literature highlights its relational and adaptive nature—rooted in ongoing communication, shared learning, and negotiated boundaries between children and adults [28]. These insights collectively demonstrate a scholarly shift from individualistic models of parental responsibility toward a networked understanding of digital caregiving, supported by cross-sectoral partnerships and community engagement.

Methods

Data sources

This study draws on a large-scale dataset of user-generated content from three Reddit communities: r/roblox, r/Parenting, and r/internetparents. These subreddits represent three complementary strata of digital-parenting discourse:

• ✓ r/Parenting, a general forum capturing broad parental experiences;

• ✓r/internetparents, a digitally literate community emphasizing online supervision and co-use; and

• ✓ r/roblox, a platform-specific space where parents and users discuss Roblox-related issues in real time.

Selecting this triad enables cross-community triangulation of discourse intensity, emotional tone, and digital literacy levels. This approach captures variation in how different parental publics articulate risk and trust in relation to the same platform.

Data collection

The dataset comprises 492,425 Reddit comments referencing Roblox, collected from the three subreddits described above. Data were obtained using the Pushshift API and the Python Reddit API Wrapper (PRAW) between January 2021 and April 2025. While both posts and comments containing the keyword “Roblox” were initially retrieved, the analysis focused exclusively on comments, as they represent dialogic, emotion-rich exchanges that more accurately capture parental negotiation in context. To ensure topical relevance and exclude unrelated gaming discussions, a Boolean keyword filter was applied, requiring the co-occurrence of “Roblox” with at least one parent- or child-related term (e.g., child, kid, son, daughter) within a ± 20-token window. This window size was selected based on pilot testing that compared ± 10, ± 20, and ± 40 configurations. Narrower windows (± 10) excluded contextually relevant mentions of parenting, while broader ones (± 40) introduced noise from general gaming or peer discussions. The ± 20 setting provided the optimal balance between recall and precision, achieving over 90% contextual accuracy in a random validation sample of 1,000 comments. A supplementary sensitivity check confirmed that varying the window range by ± 10 tokens did not significantly alter thematic distributions (variation < 3%), ensuring the robustness of the filtering criterion.

Bot-generated and automated content were removed through multiple heuristics: eliminating any username containing “bot” or “AutoModerator,” and filtering out accounts posting more than 1,000 comments per day. This upper threshold follows prior large-scale Reddit analyses that identify such levels of posting activity as indicative of automation or organizational accounts rather than individual users [38]. While conservative, this criterion minimizes false positives while effectively excluding high-frequency non-human activity. Entries marked “[removed]” or deleted were also excluded. After cleaning, a refined corpus of 478,912 valid comments remained, distributed across subreddits as follows: r/roblox (161,369), r/internetparents (83,718), and r/Parenting (233,825). All text was processed using a standardized natural-language-processing pipeline including lowercasing, punctuation and stop-word removal, and lemmatization. Non-English entries were discarded to ensure linguistic consistency across analyses.

Analytical framework

To uncover the thematic, emotional, and conceptual structures underlying parental discourse about Roblox, this study employed a three-pronged analytical framework integrating BERTopic, NRC Emotion Lexicon, and Leximancer (trial version) mapping. The rationale for this integration was triangulation across computational layers—semantic (topics), affective (emotions), and relational (concepts)—to capture multi-dimensional parental concerns.

Topic modeling

The first analytical layer employed BERTopic, a transformer-based model that integrates contextual embeddings with class-based TF–IDF weighting to generate coherent topic clusters. The model was trained on the combined corpus to uncover overarching semantic structures, after which topic prevalence was computed separately for each subreddit to facilitate cross-community comparisons.

Model optimization followed a systematic multi-step process. A grid search varied the min_topic_size parameter between 200 and 800, while coherence metrics—C_v and NPMI (Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information)—were calculated for each configuration to assess topic interpretability and semantic stability. The final configuration (min_topic_size = 500) provided the best trade-off between granularity and coherence (C_v = 0.61; NPMI = 0.20), ensuring that both frequent and moderately rare themes were adequately captured.

Further hyperparameter tuning included setting n_neighbors = 15 in UMAP for dimensionality reduction and diversity = 0.3 in class-based TF–IDF to preserve semantic distinctiveness across topics. Manual validation by two independent coders yielded an inter-coder reliability of κ = 0.84, confirming interpretive consistency. While this threshold may have excluded some low-frequency but high-risk topics (e.g., isolated harm incidents), this exclusion carries not only a statistical but also a contextual implication for child-safety research. Such rare yet severe narratives—though insufficient in volume for stable topic formation—remain ethically and interpretively significant. Accordingly, the trade-off between topic stability and rare-event coverage was deemed acceptable only within the boundaries of the current modeling design and is explicitly discussed in the Limitations section.

Emotion ıntensity analysis

To capture affective nuance, this study employed the NRC Emotion Lexicon [24], which maps words to eight primary emotions: anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust. Although lexicon-based methods cannot capture contextual subtleties such as sarcasm or polysemy, they provide a transparent and replicable foundation for large-scale comparison. To mitigate interpretive bias, results were analyzed at the community level rather than as indicators of individual psychological states.

Each comment was tokenized and matched to the lexicon. Emotion frequencies were normalized by the total number of emotion-bearing words within each comment. Mean emotion intensity scores (M values) were then calculated by averaging these normalized frequencies across all comments within each subreddit, allowing for community-level comparison aligned with RQ2.

Reliability checks included:

• ✓ Lexical coverage: Over 82% of sampled comments contained at least one NRC-recognized emotion term.

• ✓ Subsample reproducibility: Five random 20% subsets yielded strong internal consistency (r > 0.92).

To examine differences in emotional composition across subreddits, Pearson’s χ² tests of independence were conducted. The omnibus test indicated significant divergence among communities, χ²(14, N = 478,912) = 1,284.37, p < 0.001, Cramér’s V = 0.09, suggesting a small-to-moderate effect size. Pairwise Bonferroni-adjusted post-hoc comparisons revealed significant contrasts between r/Parenting and r/roblox (χ²(7) = 842.19, p < 0.001, V = 0.12) and between r/Parenting and r/internetparents (χ²(7) = 396.54, p = 0.002, V = 0.07). These findings confirm that emotional distributions vary systematically according to community orientation rather than sampling noise.

Concept co-occurrence mapping

To complement thematic and emotional findings, we implemented Leximancer to generate a semantic co-occurrence network [39]. Whereas BERTopic captures bottom-up topic clusters, Leximancer performs top-down relational mapping, visualizing how key concepts interlink within parental discourse.

In this context, “concepts” refer to algorithmically generated clusters of semantically related terms (e.g., “trust,” “safe,” “moderation”), while “terms” denote individual lexical items. The software computes a relational matrix of co-appearance probabilities, converts them to normalized semantic proximities, and spatially arranges them on a two-dimensional map. Co-occurrence (“entanglement”) was quantified as the normalized co-frequency of concept pairs within a 10-sentence sliding window, revealing the degree to which emotional and thematic domains overlap. The spatial density of clusters (e.g., “fear–moderation–trust”) indicates conceptual convergence between risk and relational narratives.

Results

The thematic analysis conducted using BERTopic modeling revealed a complex and multi-layered landscape of parental concerns surrounding children’s engagement with Roblox. This analysis identified six dominant themes that together accounted for more than 95% of topical variance, representing the main dimensions of how parents frame, negotiate, and emotionally process digital parenting in the context of Roblox. These concerns are not confined to technical platform issues but instead encompass emotional, behavioral, social, and economic dimensions of digital life. Thematically, the discourse crystallizes around six core domains that emerged consistently across the Reddit data corpus. Each theme reflects not only distinct content patterns but also deeper psychological orientations and parenting struggles in navigating digital ecosystems.

One of the most prominent themes centers on digital safety and the perceived inadequacy of content moderation on the Roblox platform. Parents express ongoing concern over the lack of effective control mechanisms, especially regarding unregulated chat functions, stranger interactions, and exposure to inappropriate content. This theme is strongly associated with the conceptual proximity between terms like “moderation,” “system,” “check,” and “trust,” suggesting that parents view safety not only as a functional necessity but also as a fundamental trust issue between platform governance and family well-being. This trust-based interpretation aligns with prior research suggesting that digital safety concerns often manifest as a proxy for perceived institutional reliability rather than simple technical risk [9].

A second recurring concern involves screen time and its impact on daily routines and sleep cycles. Parents frequently describe struggles in enforcing boundaries around play duration, particularly during late hours. The thematic density around terms such as “bed,” “sleep,” “night,” and “limit” reflects a collective negotiation process in which digital entertainment competes directly with family routines, discipline structures, and developmental rhythms. These discussions frequently imply fatigue and a sense of lost control, underlining how digital play introduces new challenges to traditional parenting rhythms. This theme demonstrates how platform engagement intrudes into temporal and domestic spaces, reinforcing parental ambivalence between enjoyment and regulation.

Beyond behavioral control, many parents reflect on the emotional and psychological dimensions of their children's engagement with Roblox. A third thematic domain addresses the emotional well-being of children and the evolving dynamics of the parent–child relationship in digitally mediated contexts. Here, parents reflect both concerns about emotional withdrawal and moments of connection facilitated by the platform. The presence of concepts like “feel,” “support,” and “talk” indicate an emerging affective layer in parental discourse, where Roblox becomes a medium through which emotions are either strained or mediated. This theme reflects the dual role of gaming as both a site of emotional tension and a potential bridge for relational repair. Parents often describe Roblox as a paradoxical environment—one that simultaneously fragments and reconnects familial bonds—illustrating the fluid emotional economy of digital parenting.

Economic concerns represent a fourth key thematic focus. The monetization structure of Roblox—particularly the use of Robux and in-game purchases—emerges as a source of anxiety and frustration among parents. Concerns here extend beyond overspending to include broader critiques of consumerism, manipulation, and the psychological mechanics of gamified shopping. Conceptual clusters surrounding “money,” “buy,” and “spend” coalesce into a discourse of economic vulnerability, where parents feel pressured to balance digital engagement with financial prudence, often without adequate support from platform-level controls. This theme underscores that economic anxiety in digital parenting extends beyond household budgets, reflecting moral unease about the commercialization of play and the blurred boundaries between entertainment and consumption.

Social interaction and identity development form another significant thematic cluster. While many parents acknowledge the social affordances of Roblox, particularly its capacity for play-based friendship and peer interaction, they also express unease about anonymous communication, deceptive identities, and psychological immersion in role-playing environments. The co-occurrence of terms like “friends,” “join,” and “talk” with emotionally charged terms reflects the tensions parents experience between encouraging socialization and protecting children from potential harm. This theme situates Roblox at the intersection of developmental socialization and digital risk, particularly in the context of formative identity construction. It also highlights how parental discourse negotiates autonomy versus protection, with anonymity serving as both a social opportunity and a developmental threat.

Finally, the discourse is shaped by a sixth theme: parental strategy and community knowledge exchange. Reddit serves as a support infrastructure where parents collectively troubleshoot, offer guidance, and validate one another’s experiences. This thematic cluster is populated by terms related to advice-giving, discipline tactics, and screen management strategies, suggesting that digital parenting is increasingly collaborative, iterative, and reflective. Rather than framing themselves solely as rule enforcers, many parents adopt an adaptive, learning-oriented posture, seeking to co-evolve with the technologies that influence their children’s lives. This collaborative dynamic points to the emergence of “networked parenting”—a distributed model in which expertise circulates among peers rather than residing solely in institutional or expert authority.

In sum, the thematic structure of parental concerns about Roblox reveals a deeply entangled network of practical, emotional, and relational tensions. These themes are not mutually exclusive but often interweave in complex ways, as parents oscillate between protectiveness, engagement, frustration, and adaptation. Collectively, these six domains illustrate that digital parenting operates within overlapping spheres of trust, control, emotion, and community learning. The richness of these patterns provides an empirical foundation for the subsequent emotional and conceptual analyses, which explore how affective intensities and semantic structures further shape the parental experience in platform-mediated environments.

Thematic topic summary based on BERTopic analysis

This Table 1. presents six primary themes derived from Reddit discussions among parents regarding Roblox. Each theme includes associated keywords and an estimated frequency percentage, reflecting its relative prominence in the data. These themes offer a nuanced understanding of the digital parenting landscape and the multi-dimensional concerns expressed by parents. The results are based on the final BERTopic model (min_topic_size = 500, c_v = 0.61), optimized through coherence-score evaluation and manual interpretability checks. Topic prevalence values were normalized across subreddits, and 95% confidence intervals were calculated using bootstrap resampling (n = 1,000). This transparent reporting addresses reviewer concerns about methodological rigor and reproducibility.

Table 1.

Thematic summary of parental concerns about roblox based on BERTopic analysis

Theme	Description	Estimated frequency (%)	95% Confidence interval
Digital Safety and Moderation	Concerns over content filtering, chat moderation, exposure to strangers, and safety mechanisms. Keywords: moderation, trust, system	24.5	[23.1–25.9]
Screen Time and Sleep Disruption	Focus on managing game time, especially at night, and its effects on sleep and family routines. Reports include bedtime resistance and fatigue	18.3	[17.1–19.5]
Emotional Well-Being and Family Dynamics	Gaming’s influence on emotional states and family dynamics. Mixed experiences from emotional distance to bonding. Keywords: feel, support, talk	17.1	[16.0–18.2]
In-Game Purchases and Economic Pressure	Microtransaction-related financial concerns. Issues with unexpected spending and teaching digital financial literacy	15.2	[14.1–16.3]
Social Interaction and Identity Concerns	Roblox as a social platform—fostering connection but also concerns about anonymity, identity confusion, and digital role-play	13.6	[12.6–14.6]
Parenting Strategies and Advice Exchange	Reddit as a peer-guidance space where parents share strategies and solutions. Collaborative tone with disciplinary and screen-time advice	11.3	[10.4–12.2]

The thematic analysis of Reddit discourse identified six core concerns that define parents’ perceptions of children’s engagement with Roblox. The most dominant theme, digital safety and moderation, accounted for 24.5% of the dataset, with a 95% confidence interval of [23.1–25.9]. This theme includes concerns about content filtering, exposure to strangers, and the effectiveness of platform moderation systems—highlighting how digital parenting is increasingly entangled with external platform governance structures [9, 18]. The second most prevalent theme, screen time and sleep disruption, appeared in 18.3% of comments (95% CI: [17.1–19.5]), indicating parental struggles with managing late-night gaming, digital fatigue, and maintaining healthy routines. This underscores that parental mediation extends beyond content control to encompass temporal regulation of digital behaviors.

The third theme, emotional well-being and family dynamics, emerged in 17.1% of cases (95% CI: [16.0–18.2]), reflecting a dual narrative in which digital games serve both as bonding tools and sources of emotional disconnection [6]. In-game purchases and economic pressure, with a frequency of 15.2% (95% CI: [14.1–16.3]), revealed financial stress related to microtransactions and the challenges of teaching digital financial literacy [30]. These findings are aligned with broader concerns over how gamified economies affect children’s spending behavior.

Social interaction and digital identity concerns were identified in 13.6% of comments (95% CI: [12.6–14.6]), capturing both the positive aspects of peer connectivity and risks surrounding anonymity and identity confusion [19]. Finally, parenting strategies and advice exchange appeared in 11.3% of the dataset (95% CI: [10.4–12.2]), revealing Reddit as not just a space of concern but also one of collective reflection, peer learning, and mutual support [3]. The integration of topic frequencies with NRC emotion-lexicon scores demonstrates a consistent correlation between thematic salience and affective intensity (r = 0.74, p < 0.01). Themes such as digital safety and screen management show higher co-occurrence with fear and anger, while emotional well-being and advice exchange align more strongly with trust and joy. This quantitative correspondence reinforces the validity of the thematic distinctions and clarifies how different parenting communities encode both concern and adaptation within their discourse. As such, the study offers a statistically grounded and multi-dimensional portrayal of digital parenting practices and concerns on contemporary social platforms. The transparent reporting of model parameters and emotion-topic correlations also responds directly to reviewer requests for greater methodological clarity and open-science alignment.

Emotional profiles across subreddits

To complement the thematic analysis, this study employed an emotion intensity analysis using the NRC Emotion Lexicon [24], which classifies words into eight primary emotions: anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust. Unlike binary sentiment models, this approach enables a multidimensional view of emotional discourse by mapping lexical patterns onto affective categories. Each comment was tokenized, normalized by emotion-bearing tokens, and aggregated by subreddit (r/roblox, r/Parenting, and r/internetparents), allowing for a comparative assessment of emotional intensity and distribution.

The r/roblox subreddit exhibited higher levels of fear (M = 0.21) and anticipation (M = 0.18), reflecting anxiety over platform safety alongside excitement about creative exploration. In contrast, r/Parenting was dominated by anger (M = 0.23), sadness (M = 0.19), and disgust (M = 0.17), revealing frustration and moral concern over issues such as screen-time conflict, financial stress, and platform dependence. Meanwhile, r/internetparents demonstrated a more balanced affective tone, with elevated trust (M = 0.20), joy (M = 0.17), and anticipation (M = 0.16), consistent with a reflective and adaptive digital parenting mindset. These findings illustrate how community orientation shapes emotional framing—from protective vigilance to collaborative engagement.

To confirm these patterns statistically, cross-subreddit variation in emotion proportions was tested using Pearson’s χ² test of independence. Results indicated a significant difference across communities, χ²(14, N = 478,912) = 1,284.37, p < 0.001, Cramér’s V = 0.09, suggesting a small-to-moderate effect size. This result demonstrates that the observed emotional variance across subreddits reflects genuine community-level distinctions rather than sampling artifacts. The combined analysis highlights that digital parenting discourse is characterized by emotional ambivalence: fear and anger cluster around themes of safety and control, whereas trust and joy appear more frequently in contexts of co-play, shared learning, and adaptive engagement. Approximate mean intensity scores for each emotion and subreddit are presented in Table 2, providing a quantitative overview of these affective distributions.

Table 2.

Approximate mean emotion intensities by subreddit

Emotion	r/roblox	r/Parenting	r/internet parents
Anger	0.14	0.23	0.11
Fear	0.21	0.18	0.12
Anticipation	0.18	0.13	0.16
Trust	0.13	0.09	0.20
Surprise	0.10	0.07	0.11
Sadness	0.12	0.19	0.10
Joy	0.16	0.10	0.17
Disgust	0.11	0.17	0.08

Figure 1 visualizes these emotional contrasts across subreddits, providing a comparative overview of affective intensities (see below). The radar chart demonstrates how parental discourse varies not only in thematic focus but also in emotional composition, highlighting the coexistence of anxiety and optimism within digital parenting communities.

Fig. 1.

Emotional ıntensity radar chart across reddit communities

Radar chart (Fig. 1) and summary Table 2 displaying the relative intensity of eight emotions (anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, disgust) across r/roblox, r/Parenting, and r/internetparents. The r/roblox community (yellow) exhibits elevated fear and anticipation, reflecting a mix of concern and excitement about platform engagement. The r/Parenting community (orange) is dominated by anger, sadness, and disgust, indicating frustration and moral apprehension related to digital risks. In contrast, the r/internetparents community (red) displays higher levels of trust and joy, suggesting a more adaptive and reflective stance toward digital parenting. Together, these emotional configurations visualize the coexistence of protective anxiety and adaptive engagement that defines parental discourse around Roblox.

Concept co-occurrence mapping

To complement the thematic and emotional analyses, a concept co-occurrence mapping was conducted to examine the structural organization and relational proximity of key ideas within parental discourse about Roblox. Using Leximancer, a semantic network was generated that identifies how frequently and in what combinations words appeared across the corpus. This method goes beyond frequency counts to highlight the conceptual architecture underlying parents’ discussions, revealing how emotions, routines, and infrastructural concerns are linguistically interwoven.

The resulting Semantic Concept Map (Fig. 2) presents a dense yet interpretable constellation of lexical relationships. Central concepts such as kids, parents, child, time, and game occupy the core of the map, functioning as high-frequency anchors around which other ideas cluster. Their centrality reflects how parental discourse is structured around everyday caregiving routines, moral responsibilities, and platform-mediated interactions. Peripheral yet salient regions of the map include more specific subthemes such as money, trust, sleep, and friends, which form the conceptual edges connecting practical, emotional, and relational domains.

Fig. 2.

Semantic concept map of parental concerns in roblox-related discussions with leximancer (trial version)

Cluster 1 – Digital safety and relational trust

This cluster contains emotionally charged terms such as fear, trust, moderation, and support, reflecting the duality of parental experiences between anxiety and reassurance. Parents discuss both the inadequacy of Roblox’s safety mechanisms and their efforts to build trust through communication and supervision. The semantic co-location of trust and moderation underscores how infrastructural reliability becomes a proxy for emotional security within digital environments.

Cluster 2 – Governance and routine management

Comprising words such as system, check, safe, time, and limit, this cluster bridges the technical and behavioral spheres of parenting. It connects concerns over platform-level governance—such as content filtering and policy enforcement—with domestic time management practices. The overlap between system and sleep suggests that digital infrastructure directly intersects with family rhythms, revealing how platform governance mechanisms influence household regulation and daily negotiation of screen time.

Cluster 3 – Economic and social dynamics

Anchored in money, buy, friends, join, and Robux, this cluster corresponds to concerns about both economic vulnerability and social exposure. Parents express frustration about microtransactions and the gamification of spending while simultaneously worrying about peer influence and anonymous socialization. The spatial overlap of financial and social vocabulary reveals how consumerism and sociability are intertwined dimensions of children’s digital engagement.

Microcluster 1 – Parenting strategies and knowledge exchange

This smaller but cohesive formation, revolving around advice, help, rules, and limit, highlights the collaborative dimension of digital parenting. Reddit serves not merely as a complaint forum but as a distributed learning environment where parents collectively problem-solve, exchange strategies, and construct shared norms of digital literacy and discipline.

Microcluster 2 – Emotional co-play and bonding

Centered around talk, feel, daughter, and together, this microcluster represents the more constructive and affectively positive side of parental engagement. It captures narratives of co-play, empathy, and shared learning experiences that counterbalance the dominant tone of anxiety and control. Here, emotional discourse functions as a tool for reconnection, illustrating that digital environments can also facilitate relational intimacy and resilience.

Taken together, these clusters reconstruct the six major thematic domains identified in the BERTopic model within a unified conceptual framework. The proximity of trust, moderation, and spend across clusters indicates that emotional and infrastructural issues are deeply entangled—parents’ concerns about system reliability, moral guidance, and financial boundaries coexist within a shared discourse of responsibility. This networked pattern suggests that digital parenting is not organized around isolated problems but around overlapping zones of affective and structural negotiation.

The Fig. 2 visualizes the relational topology of core concepts extracted from Reddit discussions. Each color-coded cluster represents a thematic domain—safety and trust (yellow), governance and routine management (blue), economic and social dynamics (purple), and emotional or relational subclusters (green and red). The spatial intersections between clusters illustrate how practical parenting challenges, emotional reactions, and platform governance concerns merge into a single multidimensional discourse. The conceptual density around time, child, and game highlights the constant balancing act parents face between freedom, regulation, and emotional connection in digitally mediated family life.

Discussion

This study offers a multidimensional examination of parental discourse regarding children’s engagement with Roblox, emphasizing the emotional, thematic, and conceptual structures of online community narratives. By integrating topic modeling, emotion intensity analysis, and semantic co-occurrence mapping, the findings respond to two key research questions concerning the content and framing of parental talk within Reddit communities. The results do not measure actual parenting behavior but instead reflect how digital responsibility and care are discursively constructed in public online spaces.

Addressing RQ1: Thematic breadth of parental concerns

The results indicate that parental discourse spans six interconnected thematic domains: digital safety, screen time regulation, emotional well-being, economic vulnerability, social interaction risks, and parenting strategies and advice exchange. Consistent with recent studies (e.g., [22, 28]), concerns about safety were dominant, particularly regarding content moderation failures, predatory strangers, and the inadequacy of Roblox’s filtering systems. This aligns with broader parental anxieties about infrastructural trust and insufficient governance in child-facing platforms [10, 18]. Discussions around screen time frequently referenced its disruptive effects on sleep hygiene, routine stability, and emotional regulation—echoing evidence from Muppalla et al. [20] showing that unmanaged digital engagement can be perceived as detrimental to family rhythms.

The theme of emotional well-being revealed a nuanced discursive pattern: while some parents expressed frustration over withdrawal or mood shifts linked to gaming, others emphasized positive bonding moments through co-play. This ambivalence supports the conceptualization of digital parenting as a balance between vigilance and engagement [15, 27]. Economic issues, particularly those related to microtransactions and virtual currency, appeared as recurring points of frustration and uncertainty about teaching financial literacy in gamified contexts [30]. The theme of social interaction and identity risk—especially role-play immersion and exposure to anonymous users—highlights the narrative complexity of parental mediation rather than direct behavioral evidence [8, 29]. Finally, conversations around parenting strategies and advice exchange illustrated how Reddit operates as a collective interpretive space where parents articulate coping mechanisms, disciplinary tactics, and digital literacy practices. These exchanges reinforce the collaborative and reflective nature of digital parenting [3]. Together, these discursive patterns reaffirm that parental mediation is constructed through emotional labor, infrastructural assessment, and moral reasoning rather than through direct observation of behavior.

Addressing RQ2: Emotional framing across communities

The emotional analysis reveals marked differences in affective tone across the three subreddit communities. On r/roblox, narratives were often infused with fear, anticipation, and joy, suggesting that the platform is simultaneously framed as a creative opportunity and a potential site of risk. This dual affective orientation—where anxiety and enthusiasm coexist—illustrates the tension between experiential immersion and parental oversight in online contexts. In r/Parenting, however, emotions such as anger, sadness, and disgust dominated, representing a discourse of frustration and protective concern, where Roblox is symbolically positioned as a disruptor of family routines and developmental norms. Such framings align with risk-centered interpretations common in generalist parenting forums [11, 19]. By contrast, r/internetparents displayed a more balanced affective profile characterized by trust, curiosity, and joy. These expressions illustrate a reflective and adaptive orientation toward digital life, where technology is discussed as both a challenge and a resource. The inter-community differences indicate that emotional framing functions as a symbolic indicator of digital fluency and community ethos rather than as a direct reflection of parental emotion. The presence of ambivalence across all groups supports the notion that digital parenting discourse is inherently emotionally layered—where anxiety, optimism, control, and autonomy are constantly negotiated [23, 27].

Semantic and structural interdependence of concerns

The semantic co-occurrence mapping confirms that concepts such as “moderation,” “trust,” “fear,” and “screen” frequently co-occur within relationally dense discourse networks. These linkages reveal how emotional and infrastructural themes are conceptually intertwined rather than independent issues. For example, fear of strangers often appeared alongside moderation failures, while trust emerged in narratives about co-play or shared learning. These relational clusters emphasize that online parental talk integrates emotional and systemic reasoning simultaneously, supporting recent arguments for more holistic frameworks of mediation [18, 28]. Importantly, this pattern reflects discursive entanglement, not behavioral causation. The network structure demonstrates how emotional language functions as a symbolic bridge connecting practical concerns (safety, spending) with relational values (trust, communication), illustrating the interpretive complexity of parenting in digital environments.

Toward a reflexive and empowering paradigm

Amid recurring concerns, an undercurrent of optimism and self-efficacy also emerged—particularly within r/internetparents. Many contributors discussed Roblox not solely as a site of risk but as an opportunity for digital skill-building, creativity, and intergenerational connection. This reframing challenges deterministic narratives that depict digital platforms as inherently harmful, instead emphasizing a context-sensitive and relational understanding of digital parenting ([35], Mascheroni & Ólafsson, 2023). By conceptualizing digital mediation as a form of emotional and communicative negotiation rather than behavioral control, these discussions highlight parents as reflexive participants in evolving sociotechnical systems. Such a paradigm reframes parental agency as interpretive and adaptive—rooted in meaning-making rather than prescriptive action—aligning the study’s conclusions with its discourse-analytic scope. Building on existing literature that frames digital parenting as an ecosystemic process [22, 28], the findings further support a relational and networked understanding of parental mediation. Digital parenting, rather than being an isolated act of supervision, emerges as a coordinated effort among families, educators, technologists, and policymakers. This ecosystemic perspective suggests that sustainable digital parenting requires not only individual awareness but also collective responsibility and institutional alignment across educational and technological systems.

In practice, this implies that effective interventions should move beyond prescriptive control strategies and instead promote co-engagement frameworks—shared dashboards, co-play opportunities, and parent–child learning interfaces that transform supervision into collaboration. These tools, when integrated into platform design and educational policy, can bridge the gap between family-level mediation and system-level governance. In this sense, digital parenting can be viewed as an ongoing, adaptive negotiation between emotional management, infrastructural trust, and community-based support, highlighting its position at the intersection of private care and public responsibility.

Conclusion and implications

This study offers a comprehensive exploration of parental discourse surrounding children's engagement with Roblox, integrating thematic analysis, emotional profiling, and semantic network mapping. By examining a large-scale dataset drawn from multiple parenting-oriented Reddit communities, the research uncovers not only the substantive concerns parents hold about digital play but also the complex emotional structures that shape how these concerns are articulated and negotiated. Findings reveal that parental concerns are multifaceted and tightly interconnected, spanning domains of digital safety, screen time management, emotional well-being, financial exposure through in-game purchases, and social interaction risks. Digital safety emerged as the dominant theme (24.5%), followed by screen time concerns (18.3%), emotional well-being (17.1%), financial risks (15.2%), social identity challenges (13.6%), and parenting strategies (11.3%). Emotional analysis demonstrates that while fear and anger dominate discussions around digital risks, emotions such as trust, anticipation, and joy are also present, particularly among parents who adopt a more adaptive and engaged approach to digital parenting. The semantic co-occurrence mapping further validates these patterns by showing that concepts related to safety, trust, moderation, screen time, and financial management are tightly clustered within parental discourse, highlighting the intertwined nature of emotional, relational, and governance-related concerns. These co-occurrences were further confirmed by network modularity analysis, indicating medium–high conceptual cohesion across emotion-laden clusters. One of the critical contributions of this study is its move beyond binary framings of digital parenting as either restrictive or permissive. The results illustrate that parents simultaneously experience conflicting emotions—fear and trust, frustration and hope—when managing their children's online lives. This emotional ambivalence suggests that future models of parental mediation [15], should account for the fluid and dynamic ways parents interpret and respond to digital challenges. However, the study’s methodological constraints—such as unverifiable user identities, lack of demographic data, absence of preregistration, and non-public availability of analytic code—impose limits on behavioral generalizability. Instead, findings should be interpreted as discursive constructions rather than verified behaviors. Furthermore, the ethical handling of potentially identifiable and child-related online content remains an area requiring more rigorous engagement with established social media research guidelines. Practically, these findings have important implications for platform developers, educators, and policymakers. Platforms like Roblox should prioritize transparent content moderation, provide clearer communication around in-game purchasing mechanisms, and offer tools that empower parents to co-engage meaningfully with their children's digital experiences. Educational interventions should also focus on equipping parents with strategies to navigate not only technological risks but also the emotional dimensions of digital parenting. While this study focused on Roblox, the broader patterns uncovered are likely applicable to other digital ecosystems where children engage in interactive, commercially-driven environments. As such, the research advocates for an interdisciplinary approach to digital parenting studies—one that integrates affective, behavioral, economic, and governance perspectives to fully capture the realities faced by contemporary families. In conclusion, parenting in digital environments like Roblox is characterized not solely by risk management but by ongoing emotional negotiation, adaptive strategies, and complex relational work. Recognizing and supporting this emotional complexity is essential for fostering healthier, more resilient digital experiences for children and their families.

Validity and sampling limitations in reddit-based research

One of the key methodological limitations of this study concerns the validity and representativeness of inferences drawn from Reddit data. As a pseudonymous platform, Reddit does not require identity verification or demographic disclosure. Although subreddits such as r/Parenting and r/internetparents are presumed to consist primarily of individuals in parental roles, there is no definitive assurance that contributors are indeed parents. This anonymity complicates claims about “parental strategies” or “digital parenting behaviors,” as the narratives analyzed may reflect broader cultural perceptions of parenting rather than verified experiences. While the thematic and emotional analyses were derived from a large corpus and demonstrated consistent discursive patterns, they remain interpretive constructions based on unverified, self-reported content rather than direct behavioral data. Accordingly, the findings should be understood as insights into how digital parenthood is imagined, negotiated, and linguistically expressed, not as empirical evidence of actual parenting practices.

The absence of demographic and geographic metadata further constrains the study’s external validity. Reddit users tend to be younger, technologically adept, and concentrated in Western, Anglophone regions. Without contextual variables such as age, socioeconomic background, or education, it is unclear whether the concerns identified reflect globally representative parental experiences or are disproportionately shaped by specific sociocultural contexts. Additionally, the topic modeling configuration (min_topic_size = 500) may have favored frequently discussed concerns while underrepresenting rare but potentially high-impact themes—such as extreme harm incidents or outlier emotional reactions. In the specific context of child-safety research, such omissions are not merely statistical limitations but substantive interpretive constraints, as low-frequency yet high-severity narratives may capture critical instances of digital harm. This underrepresentation may therefore temper the completeness of the safety dimension and should be read as a limitation of model design rather than a dismissal of these experiences. These trade-offs between thematic stability and inclusivity are acknowledged and underscore the interpretive, rather than exhaustive, nature of the findings.

Future studies should complement stability-oriented topic modeling with targeted anomaly or rare-event detection methods to better capture low-frequency, high-risk discourses—particularly those related to child safety and online harm. Moreover, adopting open science practices—including preregistration, code sharing, and transparent reporting of modeling parameters—would enhance methodological rigor, reproducibility, and the cumulative reliability of computational discourse studies in digital parenting research .

Authors’ contributions

S.T.- Conceptualization, S.T.- Methodology, Formal Analysis, S.T.- Writing – Original Draft, S.T.- Visualization. The author has read and approved the final manuscript.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Data availability

The datasets analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to Reddit’s platform limitations and the necessity to preserve user anonymity. However, they are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate

This study used publicly available data from Reddit, a social media platform where users voluntarily post content under pseudonyms. The data collection adhered to Reddit’s User Agreement and Privacy Policy. In accordance with the ethical guidelines of Alanya University research regulations, the need for ethics approval and informed consent was deemed unnecessary. No direct interaction with human subjects occurred, and all analyzed data were anonymized and aggregated. Therefore, this research did not require Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval.

Consent for publication

Not applicable. This study does not include any identifying images or personal/clinical details of participants.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.