Parents Fear Gaming Strangers But Skip the Safety Rules

Parents of young gamers have named their number-one fear, and it is not screen time. According to Ofcom's Growing Up Gaming report, published this week, 64% of parents of children aged 3 to 17 who play online games are concerned about their child talking to gaming strangers through game features and chat. It is the single biggest online gaming worry parents report, ahead of every other risk in the survey — and yet it is the one their household rules are least likely to cover.

The full ranking, as reported by Advanced Television, puts contact with strangers clearly ahead of everything else. Bullying by other players comes next at 60%, a clear step below the top concern. Seeing inappropriate content such as violence, bad language or disturbing material worries 59% of parents, while pressure to make in-game purchases sits at 51%. The hierarchy is unambiguous: who a child meets inside a game outranks what they might see or be sold.

The children's own answers explain why parents are uneasy. More than half (55%) of children who game online say they play with gaming strangers — people they have never met offline — at least sometimes, and one in five say they do so all or most of the time they play. The worry is not hypothetical: for a large share of young players, playing alongside unknown people is a routine part of play, not an edge case.

Gaming strangers top the worry list, but the rulebook lags

Here is the mismatch. Ofcom found that more than half of parents set limits on how long their child can play (56%), just over half set rules on when play is allowed, and half set rules about appropriate content (50%). Yet on the question of who their child can play with — the very thing parents fear most — fewer than half set any rules at all (43%). And roughly one in ten households sets no gaming rules whatsoever (9%).

The pattern is easy to explain and hard to defend. Parents regulate what they can see: the clock, the age rating, the bedtime. Who a child meets inside a sprawling online game is invisible from the kitchen, so it gets regulated last — if at all. The result is a rulebook aimed at the wrong risks, while the gaming strangers parents actually fear most walk through an unguarded door. The gap sits squarely on the beat covered by our tech and gaming desk.

Why the gap matters for families

Modern games are built around contact with strangers. Matchmaking, public lobbies and voice chat put children in direct conversation with people they have never met, and that contact is now thoroughly normal: nearly nine in ten children aged 3 to 17 play games on some kind of device (88%), and gaming is the most popular free-time activity among 8-17-year-olds. The audience is enormous, the social features are the product, and the rules most households write barely mention who is on the other end of the headset — which is exactly where gaming strangers enter the picture.

Ofcom is careful to say parents cannot carry this alone. Under the Online Safety Act, gaming platforms hold legal responsibility for keeping children safe, and the regulator says it has already secured changes on some of the most popular platforms, including Roblox, PlayStation and Xbox. As Tony Stower, Ofcom's online safety gaming lead, put it: "Taking a few minutes to check who your child is playing and chatting with can make a big difference." The message cuts both ways: families should tighten their rules, but platforms profit from the lobbies where gaming strangers meet children in the first place.

Check, Chat and Change: Ofcom's half-term ask

Timed for the half-term break, Ofcom is urging parents to take three steps. Check means reviewing the settings on a child's games: who can contact them, what content they can see, and the age registered on the account. Chat means asking regularly who they play and talk with, and whether anything has made them uncomfortable. Change means acting on the answers — restricting contact from gaming strangers, tightening purchase permissions, or agreeing new family rules. None of it requires technical expertise, which is the point: the regulator's own findings suggest the missing ingredient is not knowledge but follow-through.

The report is one more reminder that the biggest online risk for young gamers is not the game itself but the gaming strangers inside it. Parents have the worry in the right place; now the rules need to catch up. (See also: Nintendo's pledge to keep selling physical games for its latest console.)