Discord has introduced new enhancements to its Family Center, providing parents and guardians with deeper insights into their teenagers’ activity, such as spending habits, most frequent contacts, and time spent on the platform. These updates are intended to help parents keep track of whether their teens are dedicating too much time or money to Discord.
Originally launched in 2023, Family Center featured an activity dashboard that listed the servers teens had joined and sent weekly email summaries to guardians about their teen’s Discord usage. The platform is now broadening these monitoring features.
Guardians are now able to view the total amount their teen has spent in the past week, including purchases from the Discord Shop and Nitro, the platform’s premium subscription.
Image Credits: Discord They can also monitor the total duration their teen spent on voice and video calls in direct messages, group chats, and servers over the previous week. Additionally, Discord now highlights the top five users and servers that teens have interacted with most in the last seven days. This update follows similar moves by other social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, which have also introduced measures to limit who can contact teens.
Discord is further introducing new parental controls within the app, with certain settings that only guardians can modify. These controls allow guardians to decide who is permitted to send direct messages to their teen and to enable or disable filtering of sensitive content. They can also adjust privacy settings related to how Discord handles their teen’s data, including whether personalized ads are shown.
Image Credits: Discord The company also announced that when teens report content on Discord, they now have the choice to inform their parents or guardians about the report. However, Discord clarified that it will not reveal the specific content that was reported and encourages teens to communicate directly with their guardians about these matters.
“These new tools enable guardians with connected Family Center accounts to take a more proactive role in fostering a safer online environment for teens, while still maintaining their privacy,” Discord shared in a blog post.
Recently, a number of companies—including Meta, YouTube, and OpenAI—have introduced updates to strengthen their teen safety features. AI-focused companies like OpenAI and Character.AI have also been refining their products to better protect younger users.
