3 min read
Snapchat has rolled out a significant update to its Family Center parental tools. That means giving caregivers deeper insights into how their teenage children use the platform and who they interact with.
With the latest update, parents can now see the average amount of time their teen spent on Snapchat each day over the previous week, along with a detailed breakdown showing how that time is distributed across key features such as chatting, camera use, Snap Map exploration, and consumption of Stories and Spotlight content.
As explained by Snapchat:
This insight can help spark a dialogue about healthy screen time and online habits, giving parents concrete information to shape the discussion.
In addition to time-use metrics, Family Center now offers enhanced “trust signals” that help parents better understand new social connections their teens make on the platform. When a teen adds a new friend, parents will be able to see indicators such as whether the contact is stored in their teen’s device contacts, whether the two share mutual friends, and whether they belong to the same school or community groups. These contextual cues can lend insight into how well a teen may know a new friend in real life, which is a stark departure from earlier tools that only showed a list of friends without additional context.
Snapchat emphasized that while parents gain more visibility into patterns of usage and connections, the content of private messages remains inaccessible, preserving the confidentiality of teen communications.
“Family Center is designed to reflect the dynamics of real-world relationships by providing visibility into what teens are doing and allowing parents to adjust key settings, without showing the content of their private conversations,” the company explained in a blog. “With Family Center, in addition to the new features introduced today, parents can … set content restrictions; disable access to our My AI chatbot and soon, the AI-powered search engine Perplexity; share location as a family; and, report potentially concerning accounts on their teen’s behalf. “
The company positions the updated Family Center as a way to encourage open dialogue and mutual understanding, rather than direct surveillance or monitoring of conversations.
These enhancements reflect a broader trend in social media platforms balancing user privacy with parental oversight. As digital well-being discussions intensify globally, with lawmakers, educators, and parents increasingly concerned about screen time and online safety, Snapchat’s update arrives as a timely effort to provide tools that respect privacy while enabling adult guardians to stay informed. We are in the midst of a blanket social media ban advocacy as of writing this article, despite many scientists disagreeing with the approach, this new way of checking-in on the kids might offer an alternative.
Snap’s global rollout of the enhanced Family Center has been noted in regions including South Asia and beyond, where concerns about teen screen time and online behavior have sparked broader discussions on digital literacy and parental guidance.
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