Snapchat announces new features in Family Center that provide parents with deeper insights into how their teens use Snapchat. Snapchat’s approach is designed to support healthier online habits, grounded in trust, context, and real-world family dynamics.
Speaking on Snapchat’s approach to teen safety and parental involvement, Uthara Ganesh, Head of Public Policy, APAC Snap Inc.,said, “At Snapchat, supporting young people’s digital well-being is a core part of how we build our platform. With the latest updates to Family Center, parents can see clear, practical information about how their teens spend time on Snapchat. The feature is designed to help families have more informed conversations, while continuing to respect teen privacy. As digital habits evolve in India, we remain focused on building safety tools that are transparent by design, easy to use, and rooted in trust between parents and teens.
Insights into how teens spend time on Snapchat
In 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.
Details on new friend connections
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.
New safety and educational resources
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.
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 and soon, the AI-powered search engine Perplexity; share location as a family; and, report potentially concerning accounts on their teen’s behalf.
