Speaking as a parent, I try not to snoop on my children's conversions. If they find out you are snooping they will get very creative at hiding it. The most important thing is to know who they are interacting with and get to know their parents.

I think this depends on your children's age. If your kids are reasonable 15+, then sure. You shouldn't be spying on them. If your kids are 12? Then you probably should be.

This is less about spying or snooping and more about knowing children aren't mature enough to have private conversations with strangers.

Meanwhile I was doing full RP at 13.

I think people forget how mature children actually are.

At 12 or 13, I was being dropped off at the basement apartment of some creepy old dude who ran an Atari BBS and held open houses for the most engaged members.

From everything I saw/noticed, it was 100.0% on the up and up, but as a parent of kids that age now, the thought horrifies me.

Thought experiment: Do you think current-you could manipulate 13-year-old-you into doing something bad? If the answer is no, then that means you were mentally fully developed by age 13. To which I say congratulations, but that is definitely not typical. If the answer is yes, then you should understand the concerns that parents have.

I found this a very interesting question to ponder. I think the answer is "no," without cheating by having my own memories of myself at 13. Too many things that could accidentally give me away by not matching the vibe properly. The only chance of success would be finding a way to prey on the threat of parental overreaction and being less scary as an actual predator than over-controlling parents.

I think most of the time unsupervised children will be fine online. Sometimes they will get hurt, and perhaps very seriously hurt, by being unsupervised online.

Supervising your kid online is like putting them in a car seat even though you're unlikely to get in a crash. It's appropriate when they're young and becomes inappropriate as they get older.

What's RP?

I think children develop vastly differently from each other, maybe some others wouldn't have been doing "RP" until they were 17?

What if you were early?

I remember when I was 14-15 I wanted to play games and "hide and seek", whilst some of my friends had started enjoying sitting down and just talking, how boring.

"hide and seek" at 15 - that's highly unusual

So are Nerf guns at the office.

We still played hide-and-seek at that age, but we would rebrand/reframe it in terms of a wargame with a name like "manhunt." This was decades ago though.

I haven't seen kids playing outside in about as long.

Oops the exact age wasn't meant to be taken literally, maybe I was 13 (was long ago). And wasn't hide and seek either (but other a bit childish things)

RP = Role Play

Aha, I thought that was RPG but maybe that means computer games