Wow, amazing, have you heard about the Facebook messenger kids apps? Facebook just gets better by the day surprising us with different features and apps. For the first time, Facebook is opening up to children under the age of 13 with a privacy-focused app designed to neutralize child predator threats that plague youth-focused competitors like Snapchat.
Rolling out already on iOS in the U.S., “Messenger Kids” lets parents download the app on their child’s phone or tablet, create a profile for them and approve friends and family with whom they can text and video chat from the main Messenger app.
Amazing right, it doesn’t stop here read down to get more details in this article.
Facebook Messenger Kids Apps
The Facebook messenger kid’s app is basically the same as the free Facebook Messenger app we’re all pretty familiar with, but this one’s exclusively designed for children aged 6 – 12 to use. I guess you might be scared that the app may contain some inappropriate stuff for kids. But worry not.
This is because Facebook has created special proactive detection safety filters to prevent children from sharing nudity, sexual content, or violence, while a dedicated support team will respond quickly to report or flagged content.
Facebook even manually sifted Gimpy to build a kid-friendly version of the GIF-sharing engine. And with childish augmented reality masks and stickers, video calls with grandma could be a lot more fun and a lot less silent or awkward.
How Messenger Kids works
It’s important to understand that kids under 13 still can’t sign up for a Facebook account. Instead, parents download the Messenger Kids app to a child’s iPhone or iPad (Android coming soon). Once the parent has authenticated it with their own account, they set up a mini-profile with their kid’s name and photo.
Then, using the Messenger Kids bookmark in the main Facebook app, parents can approve anyone who is friends with them as a contact for their kid, like aunts and uncles or godparents. Messenger Kids is interoperable with the main Messenger app, so adults don’t actually have to download the Kids app.
Kids and Apps
For a long time, in order to avoid running afoul of a US federal law, the biggest social networks have simply made it against their rules for anyone under 13 to sign up. Called COPPA, or the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, the law restricts how companies collect, use, and share online data from kids and aims to give parents control over this data gathering.
The design of Messenger Kids is evidently meant to put parents at ease. It’s full of parental controls; kids must get a parent’s authorization (via the parent’s own Facebook account) to sign up and to add each new contact.
Kids Messenger Sleep Mode
Messenger Kids added a sleep mode in 2018. It allows parents to set predetermined “off times” for the app on a child’s device. When parents set a designated off time, each day at the designated time, the app will “go to sleep” and not be accessible to kids during those hours. Sleep mode is controlled by the Parent Control center. The steps are below;
- Go to the Messenger Kids controls in your Facebook app. Tap on your child’s name, and then tap on “Sleep Mode” in the App Controls section.
- Set the times you want the app to turn off for your child.
- That’s it. When the app is in sleep mode, kids cannot send or receive messages or video calls, play with the camera, or receive notifications. If they try to open the app, they’ll see a message telling them that it’s in sleep mode.
How Do You Set up Facebook Messenger App?
Below are the steps to set up your Facebook messenger app;
- First, download the Messenger Kids app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.
- Once you download the app on your child’s device, you need to authenticate your child’s device using your own Facebook username and password.
- Once that’s done, you’ll need to create a Messenger Kids account for your child (all you need to do is provide their name – no other data is requested).
At that point, your child’s device can be handed back to them so that they can start using Messenger Kids. You can get more details on the Facebook messenger app for kids here.