Snapchat advice for clueless parent

[HowDidItEnd]

13 year old DD is begging for Snapchat as apparently all her friends use it to communicate. So far I’ve said no, because I don’t understand it.

I’ve read up and it doesn’t sound great as messages disappear (so as a parent I can’t monitor it) and it seems like it would make it very easy for people use it for being unkind, knowing their messages would vanish. Can disappearing messages be turned off so I can ensure that should it be needed, full message history can be seen?

She has WhatsApp and also TikTok but I understand both of those and how to support her online safety - for example TikTok is limited to 1 hour max per day screen time to prevent endless scrolling for hours, and once or twice a week I scroll her For You page for 10 mins so I can see what the algorithm is serving her. She isn’t allowed to post herself and is happy that I monitor it, see any messages etc.

It’s just SnapChat I’ve never used and have no idea how to monitor and protect her on it.

Can any SnapChat users give any pointers or advice?

Honestly I'd keep saying no for as long as you can.

DD has WhatsApp, well actually I have WhatsApp using my phone number and she's allowed to use it to contact her friends. Contacts only, fully locked down to not be findable. I have instant and full visibility of everything live to my phone, backed up daily...... and I've spent the last 2 days dealing with school and the police because one of her classmates sent a load of explicit porn videos in the group chat to a load of 11 year olds.

It's impossible to fully protect them when there are parental controls in place, Snapchat has very few parental controls and what is there allows little to no audit trail.

There's a guide here parents.snapchat.com/parental-controls?lang=en-GB that may be helpful.

Same I'm trying to resist it