(If parents want a full block, they can just remove the blocked contact from the child’s contact list, as before.) Kids are warned if they return to or are added to chats with blocked contacts. They just aren’t able to message one-on-one. However, blocked contacts will remain visible to one another and will stay in shared group chats. With the update, unblocking is supported and parents are still able to review chats with blocked contacts. These are decisions that a child will have to make on their own one day, so being able to use this as a teaching moment is useful. (Anyone who’s dealt with tween-age drama can attest to the fact that there’s one in every group!) By gaining access to this information, parents can sit down with the child to talk about when to take that step and block someone, and when a disagreement with a friend can instead be worked out. This could be useful for identifying those problematic friends - the kind who sometimes cause trouble, but are later forgiven, then unblocked. Parents also can now see if a child has blocked or reported a user in the app, or if they’ve unblocked them. A log of images will help parents to see if all images and videos being sent and received are appropriate, and remove them or block them if not. This can save parents’ time, as they may not feel the need to review chat with trusted family members, for instance, so can redirect their focus and energy on reviewing the chats with friends. In the updated app, parents will be able to see who a child has been chatting with, and whether that’s text or video chat, over the past 30 days. (After all, grandma and grandpa are already on Facebook and Messenger, but getting them to download new apps remains difficult.) And despite Facebook’s reputation, there aren’t other chat apps offering these sort of parental controls - or the convenience of being able to add everyone in your family to a child’s chat list with ease. Others, myself included, believe that teaching kids to navigate the online world is part of your parental responsibility. Some parents don’t want their kids to have smartphones and outright ban apps, particularly ones that allow interactions. That decision, of course, is a personal one. The new Messenger Kids features will help with the oversight aspects for those parents who allow their kids to online chat. In our household, for example, it became a convenient tool for chatting with relatives, like grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, as well as a few trusted friends, whose parents I knew well.īut when it came time to review the chats, a lot of scrolling back was involved. Messenger Kids instead allows the child’s parents to determine who the child can chat with and when, through built-in parental controls. It arrived at a time when kids were already embracing messaging - but were often doing so on less controlled platforms, like Kik, which attracted predators. The Messenger Kids app was first introduced in late 2017 as a way to give kids a way to message friends and family with parental oversight. The company is also introducing a new blocking mechanism and has updated the app’s Privacy Policy to include additional information about data collection, use and deletion practices. Now, parents will be able to see who a child is chatting with and how often, view recent photos and videos sent through chat, access the child’s reported and block list, remotely log out of the app on other devices and download the child’s chats, images and videos, both sent and received. Facebook’s messaging app for families with children, Messenger Kids, is being updated today with new tools and features to give parents more oversight and control over their kids’ chats.
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