We want Minecraft to be a safe place for everyone. That's why we've designed a suite of powerful parental controls, making sure that our youngest players can explore, create, and learn in a secure and age-appropriate environment. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the different ways you can manage and monitor your child's gameplay. 

Our games bring millions of players together from around the world, all united by the goal of crafting, exploring, and having fun. That’s why it’s so important that our games are a safe and welcoming place for all players. To achieve that, we have a dedicated team of passionate people that work every day to celebrate and protect our community’s creativity and passion while ensuring interactions remain safe. But we can’t be everywhere at once. That’s where you, our players, come in. You are our community, and you help us keep Minecraft fun and safe. 

Note: To be sure that you always have access to the newest security fixes, player safety features, and gameplay optimizations, we recommend that you keep your version of Minecraft up to date. We began adding player safety features in version 1.16.4, and we’ve added more over time, so it’s important to ensure you have the latest version. We don’t provide parental control features for versions of Minecraft earlier than 1.16.4, or for modded game versions. 

Account settings

Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, Minecraft: Java Edition, Minecraft Dungeons and Minecraft Realms (Bedrock and Java Edition) require an Xbox Live or Microsoft account even if you're not playing on Xbox or another Microsoft platform. Parents can set up and manage these accounts for their kids too. 

Child accounts are all accounts for those under the age of 16 for the US & EU, and 19 for South Korea. If there isn't an adult account associated with the child account, the adult must make a Microsoft account and associate the already-created child account with it. Only parent accounts can modify settings. 

To set or edit parental controls for your child’s account, visit https://account.xbox.com/settings and click the account that you want to edit. You should see your child’s gamertag in the top right.

• To enable the ability to join multiplayer games, join clubs, or access realms, click “Online Safety” in the navigation tabs, and then select Allow for “You can create and join clubs”, and/or “You can join multiplayer games”. 
• To enable the ability to add and remove friends, click “Online Safety” in the navigation tabs, and then select Allow for “You can add friends on Xbox Live.”
• To enable chat for people not on your child’s friends list, click “Privacy” in the table header, and then locate the setting labeled “Others can communicate with voice, text, or invites.” Choose Everyone, Friends, or Block.

You can find a full description of how to manage parental consent, family settings, and Realms/multiplayer access for a child account in our comprehensive help article on the subject. 

Social Interactions 

In the 1.19.1 release of Minecraft: Java Edition we added a player reporting tool that allows anyone to report inappropriate chat messages or dangerous behavior and to send reports to our Minecraft moderators for review. This feature is available on multiplayer servers of any size, including on private servers.  

To use it, go to the pause menu and select “Player Reporting”. This brings up a screen showing all the players on the server, with two buttons next to each name.  

• The button marked with a chat box allows you to hide all messages from a player. If you hide a player’s messages, you’ll no longer be able to see those messages – though other players will. 
• The button marked with a yellow warning symbol allows you to report an abusive message. You can select multiple messages if you need to – and the context of other surrounding chat messages will also be included in the report. You can also select a category of report, and add any further comments. 

You can find out more about how the Player Reporting tool works in the Player Reporting FAQ. 

Platform-Specific Parental Controls

Some platform providers have additional parental controls that may be useful.

See, parental controls on the Nintendo Switch. 

See, parental controls on the PlayStation 5. 

For parental controls on Minecraft for Chromebook, look into Google Play support. 

Report a concern

Finally, if you encounter a problem that can’t be handled using the tools above, you can always use our Report a Concern form – which covers chat, player skins, gameplay, and anything else. The more information you can provide in the form, the better.