Snapchat Rolls Put First-Ever Parental Tools Including a Family Center to Provide Safety for Teens

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Snapchat has announced a new feature on their app — the Family Center — giving the popular social media site its first-ever parental controls in the decade since its first launched.

Announced through a blog post by Snap Inc. on Tuesday, the messaging app revealed their new parental tools and explained how it will work moving forward.

In the company's words, the in-app tool "will help parents get more insight into who their teens are friends with on Snapchat, and who they have been communicating with, without revealing any of the substance of those conversations."

For the company, this system is similar to how parents currently engage with their kids in real life: they know who their best friends are but not what they talk about in private.

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In the new Family Center, parents will also be able to report accounts that seem concerning. "We're also equipping parents and teens with new resources to help them have constructive and open conversations about online safety," the tech company added.

"To help develop Family Center, we worked with families to understand the needs of both parents and teens, knowing that everyone's approach to parenting and privacy is different," the company acknowledged. "Our goal was to create a set of tools designed to reflect the dynamics of real-world relationships and foster collaboration and trust between parents and teens."

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You have to be at least 13 to use Snapchat, though many underage users have found ways to sign up for the app. Parents have never had any way to monitor their behavior until now.

"We have a responsibility to make sure teens are safe and healthy on Snapchat," Nona Farahnick Yadegar, the director of platform policy and social impact at Snapchat, told NBC News' Kate Snow. "If your teen has friends over in the basement to play video games, you might know who they're down there playing video games with, but you wouldn't be sitting in the room, listening to their conversation. With 'Family Center', we really wanted to balance parental insight into their teens' life, while really preserving autonomy and privacy for the teen themselves."

To be a part of the Family Center, both teens and parents have to have their own Snapchat accounts and be friends with one another. Parents, guardians or trusted relatives aged 25+ can be a part of the Family Center. The teens will also have to agree to the controls, The New York Times reported.

The new Family Center will be in addition to the already existing restrictions on teenage profiles, ages 13 to 18. Among the restrictions, teens have to be mutual friends with each other in order to start a conversation.

In addition, teens cannot have public profiles and cannot change their birth year until turning 19. Profiles from teens are also less likely to appear in "suggested friends" as they will only show up if there are mutual friends in common.

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Currently, users have to opt into the Family Center in oder for it to work.

"There is the conversation that needs to take place between parents and young people. I like that feature, because I think it forces parents to talk to their kids," Chris McKenna, father of four and founder of child safety group "Protect Young Eyes," told NBC. "If a child says no, that's worthy of a conversation."

As for critics questioning why Snapchat, which was launched 2012, is just finally create parental controls? Farahnick Yadegar told NBC this has long been in the making.

"We were really deliberate about building 'Family Center' in a way that would allow us to bring something to market with the fact that we wanted to really know what would be useful to parents and their teens," Farahnick Yadegar said. "So we spent over a year on Family Center — plenty of time to be able to talk to online experts in safety, in wellness, and to parents — about what they hope to see on Snapchat."

The Family Center is now available in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, The New York Times reported. The feature will be available in other countries starting this fall.