F.Y.I.

Snapchat updates Family Centre to give parents deeper insights into teen activity

January 28, 2026 11:44

Snapchat has introduced new Family Centre features, providing parents with detailed information on how teens use the app and additional context on new friend connections.

The announcement:

At Snapchat, protecting teens while supporting parents and carers remains a core priority. Family Centre was introduced in 2022 to provide families with practical tools to help guide teens towards a safer, more positive online experience, with strong safety settings enabled by default.

Today, Snapchat is introducing new Family Centre features designed to make the experience easier to navigate and provide parents with deeper insights into how their teens use Snapchat.

Insights into how teens spend time on Snapchat
Through Family Centre, parents can now see the average amount of time their teen spends on Snapchat each day over the previous week. This includes a breakdown of how that time is spent across different features, whether chatting or snapping with friends, creating with the Camera, exploring Snap Map, or watching content on Spotlight and Stories.

These insights are intended to help parents and carers better understand their teens’ digital habits and support more informed conversations about screen time and online behaviour.

More context around new friend connections
Family Centre already provides parents with visibility into their teen’s friends list, including a complete list of existing friends and any new friends added over the past week.

With the latest update, parents can now also see additional context when their teen adds a new friend, such as whether they have mutual friends, whether the person is saved in their contacts, and which communities they share.

This added context is designed to help parents feel more confident about new connections and better understand how their teen knows the people they are communicating with. Where a connection is unfamiliar, parents have the information needed to start a constructive conversation.

New safety and educational resources
Snapchat has also introduced a new video to help parents and carers better understand how to set up and use Family Centre, providing clear, step-by-step guidance.

Family Centre is designed to reflect real-world family dynamics by offering visibility into activity and control over key settings, without providing access to the content of private conversations. In addition to the new features announced today, parents can use Family Centre to view their teen’s friends list and recent contacts; set content restrictions; disable access to My AI and, soon, the AI-powered search engine Perplexity; share location as a family; and report potentially concerning accounts on their teen’s behalf.

For more information about Family Centre and how to get started, visit parents.snapchat.com.