Snapchat is expanding the capabilities of its Family Center parental tools, adding new insights designed to help parents and caregivers better understand how teens spend time on the app and how they’re connecting with new friends.
Family Center, introduced in 2022, was built to support parents in guiding teens toward safer online experiences, with stricter defaults aimed at younger users. The latest update focuses on making the hub easier to navigate while adding more transparency features that can prompt conversations about screen time, online habits, and who teens are communicating with.
A key addition is a time-spent view that shows parents the average time their teen spent on Snapchat each day over the past week. The dashboard also breaks usage down by feature area, including Chat and Snaps, Camera creation, Snap Map exploration, and content consumption through Spotlight and Stories. Snapchat positions the feature as a way to ground screen-time discussions in concrete data rather than guesswork.
Snapchat is also adding more context around new friend connections. While Family Center already shows a teen’s existing friends list and new friends added in the past week, parents will now be able to see signals about how their teen may know a newly added contact. Those signals can include mutual friends, whether the person is saved in the teen’s contacts, and shared community affiliations, providing additional context for parents who want to better understand new connections.
Alongside product changes, Snapchat is embedding more educational resources inside Family Center, including a new introductory video and direct access to its digital safety program, The Keys: A Guide to Digital Safety. The company describes the course as an interactive experience intended for teens and caregivers to complete together, strengthening shared understanding of online risks and safety behaviors.
Snapchat emphasized that Family Center is designed to mirror real-world parenting dynamics by increasing visibility and enabling controls without exposing the contents of private conversations. In addition to the new insights, the company says parents can view recent communication contacts, set content restrictions, share location as a family, and report potentially concerning accounts on a teen’s behalf. Snapchat also notes that parents can disable access to its My AI chatbot and plans to add controls related to an AI-powered search experience involving Perplexity.
KEY QUOTE:
“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.”
Snapchat is a company statement
