Today’s teen and parent check-ins are more complex than ever. This is in part due to teens connecting with each other across various digital touchpoints, on top of in-person hangs or school activities. From getting mentioned in a server channel to getting invited to a new group direct message, the connection touchpoints for your teen can be more frequent than the in-person hangs or even AIM chats you remember.
At Discord, we know parents and guardians work to stay up to date on the latest apps to support their teens so they can thrive. In practice, this typically involves conversations around your teens’ time spent connecting online – whether that’s playing games, getting deeper into a school subject or finding new friends in a new club’s digital space – so we have published a Discord overview to help out.
Guardians have a lot of great resources to help their teens navigate the online world, but we wanted to provide a resource about Discord, from Discord. That’s why we introduced our new Guardian’s Guide to Discord built to help you better understand how Discord works, to provide information on how your teen might spend time on Discord and to discover tips and resources to talk to your teen about keeping their online experiences comfortable.
National PTA has collaborated with Discord to provide helpful resources for parents and caregivers, including this guide.
Here’s a snapshot preview of what to expect:
Let’s first start with what is Discord?
Discord is a voice, video and text platform that makes it easier and more fun for friends to talk and hang out before, during and after playing games.
We’re in the business of authentic connection, not doom scrolling. Our platform brings people together over shared experiences and gives everyone a place to belong. With over 200 million monthly active users, Discord helps friends and communities of all sizes come together to hang out and explore their interests. In our guide, we provide a glossary to further breakdown the Discord lingo.
Who can talk to your teen on Discord?
No matter how your teen chooses to use Discord, our customizable settings allow them to curate the best experience for their needs.
- User Settings – Global defaults: Imagine Discord as a city with many neighborhoods. User settings are the rules across all of Discord. They help you understand what to expect regardless of what neighborhoods you visit in Discord city.
- Server Settings – “Defaults” for specific places: Server settings can be thought of as rules for a specific neighborhood or part of your city. In addition to the rules that are in place for a city, you can also choose the neighborhood and can apply additional controls for each.
- Individuals – Actions on specific people: Sometimes there are specific people you don’t want to engage at all or people you no longer want to be friends with. Discord allows users to decide who they interact with.
Discord’s approach to building positive experiences
You can read more in the Guardian’s Guide, but Discord has several tools that help us maintain an environment where teens are comfortable to find and to build authentic friendships.
- Our Family Center is an opt-in tool to help you learn more about how your teen spends their time on Discord and about the groups they are a part of. This is a go-to tool for guardians to view information about your teen’s recent activity and you’ll also receive weekly updates containing a high-level summary of their activity via email. You can find Family Center by going to the “Family Center” section of user settings (⚙️).
- Our Teen Safety Assist initiative is focused on further protecting teens through features, including multiple safety alerts and sensitive content filters, that are default enabled for teen users.
- We worked with global teens to co-create our newly published Teen Charter. This set of principles represent the expectations teens have of each other and of Discord. These principles include:
- Authenticity – come as you are
- Inclusivity – take space, make space
- Privacy – what’s yours is yours
- Transparency – know the Discord deets
All of these efforts sit on top of the content moderation work our team does and our work to develop products that adhere to our “Safety by Design” principle, ensuring we consider safety in every design decision.
Our goal is to help families foster productive dialogue about safer internet habits, and to create mutually beneficial ways for guardians and teens to connect about experiences online.
To learn more about how we approach safety and privacy here at Discord, we have more resources in our regularly updated Safety Center.
Discord is a Proud National PTA Sponsor, supporting the PTA Connected initiative. National PTA does not endorse any commercial entity, product, or service. No endorsement is implied.
