Discord expands Family Centre, letting parents track teens’ weekly spending and activity

Discord has expanded its Family Centre tools, introducing new features that allow parents and guardians to gain greater insight into their teenagers’ activity on the platform — including weekly spending, time spent on calls, and top interactions. The update aims to help families ensure that teens are using the app responsibly, without excessive time or financial outlay.

Originally launched in 2023, Discord’s Family Centre provided an activity dashboard showing which servers a teen had joined, along with weekly email summaries outlining their activity. The latest update builds on that system, offering a more comprehensive view of how teens engage with the platform.

Guardians can now view the total purchases made by their teen over the past week, covering items from the Discord Shop and Nitro subscriptions, the platform’s premium membership service. They can also track total time spent on voice and video calls across DMs, group chats, and servers, as well as see the top five users and servers their teen interacted with during the last seven days.

The move comes as major social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat continue to strengthen protections around teen privacy and contact restrictions.

Discord has also added new parental control settings that can only be modified by guardians. These include the ability to determine who can send direct messages to the teen, whether sensitive content should be filtered, and how the platform handles data privacy and personalised advertising for younger users.

In a further update, when teens report content on Discord, they will now have the option to notify their parents or guardians of the report. However, the company clarified that the specific content being reported will not be disclosed, encouraging teens instead to discuss such matters directly with their families.

Discord stated that the new features are designed to enable guardians who have linked Family Centre accounts to play a more active role in fostering a safer digital environment, while still respecting teen privacy.

The update aligns with a broader industry trend: in recent months, technology companies including Meta, YouTube, and OpenAI have all rolled out additional teen safety and parental supervision tools, reflecting growing regulatory and social scrutiny over how digital platforms engage with younger users.