WhatsApp is introducing optional parental controls for teen accounts, giving families tools to manage privacy, group activity, Channels, Status and the Meta AI experience without giving parents access to the content of personal messages or calls.

The controls are designed to be set up by parents and teens together. WhatsApp said the tools are intended to give families more control over how teens use the service while keeping personal communications protected by end-to-end encryption.

Privacy settings and group alerts

Parents will be able to choose privacy settings such as who can see a teen’s profile photo or add the teen to groups. If the teen later wants to relax one of those settings, WhatsApp will require approval through a parent-set PIN.

Parents can also choose to receive notifications when a teen joins or leaves a group, or when a group the teen belongs to grows meaningfully in size.

Channels, Status and Meta AI

The controls extend to how teens use Channels and Status. Parents can choose how their teen can use Channels, which Status updates they can see, and who can see the teen’s own Status updates.

For Meta AI, parents can choose between WhatsApp’s default 13+ setting and a stricter Limited Content option.

WhatsApp said all of the controls are optional and can be adjusted or switched off. Even when they are enabled, personal messages and calls remain end-to-end encrypted, meaning parents and WhatsApp cannot read or listen to the content of those conversations through the parental-control feature.

Broader family controls

The teen controls follow WhatsApp’s Parent Managed Accounts feature for pre-teens. The company said it plans to continue developing the parental-control tools based on feedback from families.

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