Discord’s Family Center update now lets parents monitor weekly purchases

Discord has rolled out updates to its Family Center, giving guardians more insights into their teens’ usage patterns, including purchases, top interactions, and time spent. The goal is to help parents monitor whether their teen is spending excessive time or money on Discord.

The communication platform first launched Family Center in 2023 with an activity dashboard showing which servers their teens have joined and a weekly email summary for guardians about their teen’s activity. The platform is now expanding these monitoring abilities.

Guardians can now see total purchases made by the teen in the last week, including items from Discord’s Shop and Nitro subscriptions (Discord’s premium membership service).

They can also view the total time spent on voice and video calls in DMs, groups, and servers over the past week. Plus, Discord will display the top five users and servers teens interacted with in the last seven days. This comes after other social networks Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat have also implemented restrictions on who can contact teens.

Discord is also adding new parental controls to the app with settings that can only be altered by guardians. They can now control who can DM their teen and whether sensitive content should be filtered. Guardians can also manage data privacy controls for teens, determining how Discord uses their data, including whether to show them personalized ads.

The company also said that when teens report content on the platform, they now have an option to notify their parents or guardians of their action. However, Discord said it won’t disclose what content was reported and encourages teens to discuss this directly with their guardians instead.

“The new features allow guardians who have linked Family Center accounts to play a more active role in creating a safer space online for teens while still respecting their privacy,” Discord said in a blog post.

In recent months, several companies, including Meta, YouTube, and OpenAI, have rolled out updates to bolster their tools around teen safety. Companies like OpenAI and Character.AI have had to iterate on their AI products to make them safer for teens.