The family center was officially announced on Monday by Snapchat, which has been in development for the past few months. This new family center will allow parents to effectively track whom their teens are reaching out to through the app while keeping the details of their conversations private.
 With Family Center, designed to help parents better understand how their kids are using the app without crossing those privacy lines, Snapchat decided to announce this new feature to media.

According to Snap:

"Family Center is designed to reflect the way that parents engage with their teens in the real world, where parents usually know who their teens are friends with and when they are hanging out – but don't eavesdrop on their private conversations. In the coming weeks, we will add a new feature that will enable parents to easily view new friends their teens have added."
For example, parents will have the chance to mark any accounts that could be deemed to pose some problems and send straight to Snap's Trust and Safety teams; this may help circumvent unwanted attention in the app faced by their children
Parents will first sign up for their own Snapchat account to access the platform. Once that's done, they will be granted access to the Family Center within the app.
adolescents will have to accept an invite from their parents to sign up for their dashboard in the Family Center, so everything will be fully transparent.

(As a secondary benefit, it can also be used to help Snapchat expand its active user populations, since every parent wishing to access the Family Center will need to become a registered member in order to access its features.)

A very important update, but one with a level of risk for Snap in respect to whether it makes an app less appealing.

Its ephemeral nature, over time, has made Snapchat a crucial ground for the more daring, edgy sharing activity, unlike, say, Facebook, where your family is watching everything you do. With parents entering into the fray now, this might make it a less attractive proposition for such engagement, which could dilute the value of the platform in the eyes of younger audience.

Despite this, however, there have also been enough reports of how Snapchat is regularly used for sending lewd messages and organizing meetings and hook-ups with all the attendant risk. Furthermore, drug dealers are reportedly using Snap to organize meet-ups and sales.

Logically, parents will want to know more about this - but again, I can't see Snap users will be so free with an intrusive device in this regard.

There's good purpose here, though, and this looks like the compromise Snap must, and should make.

But it might just see at least some of this activity drift off to other platforms instead.

In addition to that, Snap will also develop the functionality of its Family Center as follows:

". including new content controls for parents and the ability for teens to notify their parents when they report an account or a piece of content to us.". While we self-regulate and curate both our content and entertainment platforms, and do not allow uncurated content to reach a large audience on Snapchat, we understand that each family has different perspectives about what content may be suitable for their teenagers and want to give them the ability to make those personal decisions.
Overall, it seems to be worth being a worthwhile complement to the protection tools that Snap already has in place, blocking unwanted messages between adults and youngsters as well as limiting teens from coming up in search results.

And on balance, it does seem that the potential value outweighs the potential cost of losing user engagement.