Snapchat’s Newest Feature Is Helping Parents of Teens Sleep Easier at Night
If you thought late nights and fractured sleep was just a hallmark of the baby years, we have some bad news… While it’s true that parents will start to get more sleep as their child grows, it’s also true that you’ll spend many nights anxiously waiting by the door for your teen to get home. We can’t help it! If our child is out in the world, we are going to worry about them. Snapchat’s latest feature is designed to give parents of teens peace of mind — so maybe (fingers crossed!), we can finally sleep easier at night.
Snapchat’s latest feature is called HomeSafe, and it’s an automatic alert that will let trusted family members and friends know when you arrived home after a drive. (If your mom has ever frantically woken you up in the middle of the night to check on you because you forgot to text her you made it home, then you know exactly how important this is!)
HomeSafe works like this: teens can set their home location on their Snap Map. Before heading home from a late night at work, a concert, a date, or any other reason, users can open the conversation, tap the Map icon, then tap the Home Safe button. It will give this private chat an automatic, one-time alert that you’ve arrived home, so you don’t have to remember to send that follow-up text. Because every anxious mom fears the worst when their child doesn’t text them that they returned home!
Credit: Snapchat
Snapchat
“Home Safe alerts are designed with safety and privacy in mind,” a statement by Snapchat read. “Alerts can only be sent to friends you already share your location with, and the notification goes out only once, then shuts off automatically. As always, location sharing on Snap Map is off by default, so no one can see your location or receive a Home Safe alert unless you proactively choose to share it.”
More than 400 million people use Snap Map every year to connect with loved ones and find places to visit nearby. In 2024, the company brought Snap Map to its Family Center, where parents of teens can request that they share their live location (and can share their location back) to keep everyone in the family updated.
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Last year, boys in our SheKnows Teen Council said that at least 100 people could see their location on Snap Map at any given time and sometimes more. “There’s probably about 250 people that can see my location,” Griffin, 16, told us.
Other teens feel let out if they see their friends without them. “Sometimes I get a little bit of FOMO when I see people together without me,” Calder, 16, shared. “Especially if it’s my friends, and it’s a plan I wasn’t invited to. Or, even that I was invited to and I couldn’t go.”
Still, if your teens are going to use Snap Map anyway, might as well make it beneficial for parents as well by keeping us informed of their whereabouts —and letting us know when they make it to their end-of-night destination (home, a friend’s house, a co-parent’s house) safely.
Before you go, check out how these celebrity parents’ tales about teaching their teens how to drive.
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