Offering Parents Deeper Insights with Snapchat's New Family Center Features

We work diligently to protect teens on our platform while giving parents and caregivers the tools to play an active role in their teen’s experience on Snapchat. We launched Family Center in 2022 to give parents practical support to guide their teens toward a safe and positive online experience - starting with strict settings by default.

Today, we’re making Family Center easier to navigate and even more robust with new features that provide parents with deeper insights into how their teens use Snapchat.

In our Family Center, parents can now see the average amount of time their teen spent on Snapchat each day over the previous week. They can also see how that time breaks down across different features – whether their teen is spending time Chatting or Snapping with friends, creating with the Camera, exploring with the Snap Map, or watching content on Spotlight and Stories. This insight can help spark a dialogue about healthy screen time and online habits, giving parents concrete information to shape the discussion. 

Family Center already offers parents visibility into who their teen is friends with on Snapchat, showing a complete list of existing friends and any new friends that have been added over the past week.

Now, when a teen adds a new friend on Snapchat, parents will be able to see how their teen might know the person - whether they have mutual friends, are saved in their contact book, and which communities they belong to. 

These trust signals make it easier for parents to understand new connections and have greater confidence that their teen is chatting with someone they know in real life. If a parent or guardian sees a new friend they aren’t familiar with, they have the information they need to start a productive conversation.

To help parents and caregivers better understand how to use our Family Center tools, we’ve created a new video that breaks down how to get started in simple, straightforward terms.

We’ve also embedded Snapchat’s online safety program, The Keys: A Guide to Digital Safety, directly into Family Center to make it easier to find and access. The Keys is an interactive course designed to educate teens and families about online risks and how to help protect themselves. It’s meant to be a joint learning experience to strengthen communication between teens and caregivers about digital safety. 

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. With Family Center, in addition to the new features introduced today, parents can see their teens’ friends list and who they’ve communicated with recently; set content restrictions; disable access to our My AI chatbot; share location as a family; and, report potentially concerning accounts on their teen’s behalf. 

To learn more about Family Center and how to get started, visit parents.snapchat.com 

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