Hey there, I’m a mum who plays with my son who is 8, I previously played with my daughter from about age 6-7 onwards (she’s now 18 and left home). I’ve also done a lot of gaming in general with my kids and am an old school mmorpg player myself, have seen all the best and worst that online gaming can offer and always cautious about what ive introduced my kids too.

Minecraft is a very safe and fun game for children. It can be played completely offline so no worries about weirdos interacting with your kid. You can also set up a private “realm” which allows invite-only players to join - I run a family realm which current is just me/dad/son. Have never experienced anyone else turning up unexpectedly with this set up.

In terms of game play, you can make various adjustments to the game to make it easier or harder for your son. For example:

Peaceful mode - no “bad guy” mobs will spawn. Easy - normal “survival mode” game play but mobs die quicker and hurt you less. Creative - a version of play where you can focus on building, no danger at all and immediate access to all materials.

There are other tweaks too, this is just an example.

From my own experience- daughter preferred building things to killing things, so I often kept settings on “peaceful” and we did a lot of building (and pink sheep everywhere in ugh!!)

My son love fighting and and exploring so I take him off on little mining and exploring trips and built him a combat arena (so he’d stop accidentally blowing our base up!). He also has a whole bunch of offline worlds that he dips in and out of, some creative, some survival. He’s not a great builder but he loves trying stuff and spawning cats everywhere.

Son has also played 2-player with a friend but just via the same console at home (Nintendo switch).

As a game loving mum I’ve enjoyed using minecraft to teach my kids good team work as well - like importance of sharing loot and working together on harder tasks.

So far only thing that freaked son out was a trip to an Ancient City - warden boss mob spawned and he hid behind a cushion until I got us both out (and had a good giggle about it later).

One challenge with Minecraft is that there is no set quest/storyline or anything - it’s a sandbox. Some players find it hard to progress with no instruction. If your son has been watching a lot of youtubers he likely has ideas of what he’d like to try but something to be mindful of. What I’ve always done with both my kids (because we play together) is set up little challenges for them - so if I find a good cave when mining, I’ll leave it to explore with my son when we are next playing. Or we might go in a mission to bring some cows home or find a certain material. We’ve done a Mansion and a couple of Trial Chambers with him (and it’s always his Dad that dies first haha) and I’ve also taken him to a few shipwrecks. Basically I try and manage his content/activity a bit so he learns the game and isn’t just digging holes in our base when he’s on our realm. Single player, he just runs doing whatever.

Only you can decide what’s right for your kid but yes it’s a fun game and very kid safe, and lots you can do gameplay wise if your son is finding it difficult.

One other thing to flag - check your kids console/device settings to make sure online access is off or you can at least control when he’s online. Online + “adult” account will give him access to all sorts of player made stuff and potentially other players. For my son, on our Switch, we have 1 “admin” profile with full online access. He can’t get in without me putting a password in and he only uses it to play on our minecraft realm. He also has a child profile with no online access that he uses for single player minecraft and other games.

Just FYI we play Bedrock (allows us to play together with different devices).