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The messaging app, which is popular with teenagers, has faced legal pressure to roll out tools so parents can keep an eye on their children’s social media activity.

Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, said in a blog post that its new tools would let parents see whom their teenagers were friends with on the app and whom they had communicated with in the previous seven days. Parents will also be able to report accounts that their children are friends with if they violate Snapchat’s policies. Parents will not be able to see their children’s conversations on the app.

To gain access to the controls, people have to create Snapchat accounts and be friends with their children, who have to agree to the controls. The company said it would introduce additional features later, including one that lets parents see whom their children recently became friends with. Teenagers will also be able to notify their parents if they report accounts or content.

“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,” Snap said in the blog post.

Read more here.

WASHINGTON (TND) — A national teachers union is promoting a “pronoun card” tool for students to indicate whether they want their school to hide their gender identity from their parents.

On the pronoun card, known as a “Student Introduction Card,” is a question asking students whether they wish for school staff to hide their potentially new gender identity from their parents.

The idea was the brainchild of Stephanie Salem, a high school English teacher in suburban Chicago and member of the North Suburban Teachers Union – an affiliate of the second largest teachers union in the nation, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Salem’s pronoun placard idea was shared in a blog post titled “Why Are Pronouns Important at School?” on the AFT’s Share My Lesson website, a place for teachers to share their lesson plans for other instructors around the country.

Read more here.

The report offers the latest data and trends in child well-being. States are ranked overall, as well as across four domains of well-being. Learn more here. 

This September will mark six years since the world first learned about the horrific abuse that occurred at Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics and exposed the institutional failures that allowed one man to abuse hundreds for decades.

Six years later, although this now defamed doctor Larry Nassar is in prison, the painful reality is that we have done far too little as a country to prevent what happened to hundreds like me — and children across the United States — from happening again.

The Communist Party of China’s most popular spyware app aimed especially at young girls — TikTok — is actually changing the minds of our children by conditioning their behavior. First, girls are spending countless hours glued to their phones, but then… these young girls are actually developing new mental disorders.

Yes, TikTok is giving girls mental problems.

According to a new report from Christina Buttons at The Post Millennial, girls spending too much time on TikTok are developing their own “functional neurological disorder[s]” — even developing “functional tics” — as a result of the content they’re watching on the app. This means that TikTok is successfully reshaping the behavior of young American girls.

Dr. Omar Danoun, a Henry Ford Health neurologist, explains that many young girls when watching someone with uncontrolled tics or behaviors — such as seizures — will themselves mimic that behavior as a coping mechanism to the tragedy they’re persistently encountering.

Read more here.

Actor Marisol Nichols is working as a real-life undercover operative, helping police stop human trafficking. NBC’s Emilie Ikeda reports for Saturday TODAY.

Watch here.

Horrific and disturbing.

Read more here.

Visa and Mastercard said Thursday card payments for advertising on Pornhub and its parent company MindGeek would be suspended after a lawsuit stoked controversy over whether the payments giants could be facilitating child pornography.

A federal judge in California on Friday denied Visa’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit by a woman who accuses the payment processor of knowingly facilitating the distribution of child pornography on Pornhub and other sites operated by parent company MindGeek.

Visa CEO and Chairman Al Kelly said in a statement Thursday that he strongly disagrees with the court and is confident in his position.

Read more here.

It’s that time of year again — kids are heading back to school! For lots of reasons, family routines can get disrupted during the summer, from morning routines and bedtimes to TV and video game limits.

Now’s a great time to check in as a family on expectations related to technology and entertainment. The tips and resources here can help you reset rules for screen time, have conversations about using tech in safe and healthy ways, and ease your kids’ transition back to learning in the classroom.

Educators can use this back-to-school checklist to kick off the school year with positive tech and media use.

Bring back family screen time rules.

The start of the new school year is a great time to revisit family rules about screen time and technology. Talk with your kids about when, where, how, and for how long they should be using devices and tech, and then create a plan together with these family media agreements:

• For younger children (grades K–5): English and Spanish
• For older children (grades 6–12): English and SpanishRead more here.