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

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.