Discord’s Family Center update now allows parents to monitor weekly purchases

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

The communications platform first launched Family Center in 2023, with an activity dashboard that shows which servers their teens have joined and a weekly email summary to guardians of their teen’s activity. The platform now extends these monitoring capabilities.

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

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

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

“The new features allow guardians who have linked Family Center accounts to play a more active role in creating a safer place 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 strengthen their tools around teen safety. Companies like OpenAI and Character.AI have had to iterate their AI products to make them safer for teenagers.