As conversations around screen time and teen digital well-being take centre stage for families across India, Snapchat announces robust 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.
New features launched include insights into how teens spend time on Snapchat, details on new friend connections, and new safety and educational resources.
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, including 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 support conversations around healthy screen time and online habits by providing parents with concrete information.
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 added over the past week.
With the latest update, when a teen adds a new friend on Snapchat, parents can now see how their teen might know the person, including whether they have mutual friends, are saved in their contact book, and which communities they belong to. These trust signals help parents better understand new connections and support conversations if a new contact is unfamiliar.
New safety and educational resources
Snapchat has also introduced a new video resource to help parents and caregivers understand how to use Family Center tools. The video outlines how to get started in clear and straightforward terms.
Family Center is designed to reflect real-world family dynamics by offering visibility into teen activity and allowing parents to adjust key settings without access to private conversations. Along with the newly introduced features, parents can view their teens’ friends list and recent contacts, set content restrictions, disable access to the My AI chatbot and the AI-powered search engine Perplexity, share location as a family, and report potentially concerning accounts on their teen’s behalf.
