Snapchat adds new tools to monitor teen activity

Snapchat has rolled out a significant update to its “Family Center” parental tools. This 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. They also get a detailed breakdown showing how that time is spent 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” to help parents understand new social connections their teens make. When a teen adds a new friend, parents can see if the contact is stored in their teen’s device contacts, whether they share mutual friends, and if they belong to the same school or community groups. These cues help parents know how well a teen may know a new friend, unlike older tools that only showed a list of friends.

Snapchat emphasized that while parents gain more visibility into usage and connections, the content of private messages remains inaccessible, keeping teen communications private.

“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 said. “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 says the updated “Family Center” encourages open dialogue and mutual understanding, rather than direct surveillance of conversations.

These enhancements reflect a global trend of balancing user privacy with parental oversight. With increasing discussions about screen time and online safety, Snapchat’s update gives parents tools that respect privacy while staying informed. While there is ongoing debate and advocacy for social media bans, this new approach offers an alternative way for parents to check in on their kids.

Snap’s global rollout of the enhanced “Family Center” includes regions such as South Asia, where concerns about teen screen time and online behavior are growing.