Facebook & Messenger Kids: the parent’s guide

The age question

Facebook’s minimum age is 13: its terms say you cannot use Facebook if “you are under 13 years old”. Most kids today use Instagram or TikTok instead, so for parents Facebook usually matters in two places — Messenger Kids, which is a separate app for under-13s run from your account, and Marketplace, which teens use for concert tickets and clothing resale despite being adults-only.

Messenger Kids (under 13)

A standalone app run from the parent’s own Facebook account. Meta says there are “no ads in Messenger Kids and no in-app purchases”, and that creating an account for your child does not create a Facebook account for them. Two things are worth knowing before you rely on it. Approving every contact is a setting, not the default behaviour — you have to choose it. And the Parent Dashboard does not show you the text of your child’s conversations; its Activity tab shows images and videos sent and received, and full conversations come from downloading the child’s information. Setup:

1. From your own Facebook, go to Home › Messenger Kids › Accounts you manage › Create account for child, and enter their name and birthday.
2. Install the Messenger Kids app on your child’s phone or tablet and verify the device.
3. In Parent Dashboard › Controls › Friending, pick “Only I can choose friends” if you want every contact to go through you. The alternative, “My child can choose friends”, lets them add and remove people and notifies you each time.
4. Use the Parent Dashboard for the rest: sleep mode, the contact list, and the Activity tab. To read conversations, use Controls › Download [Name]’s Information — it is password-protected, and your child is notified that you downloaded it.

Teen account on Facebook

Start by checking what is already on. Meta says accounts for teens 13–17 are “automatically set to protective Teen Account settings” that limit who can contact them and filter sensitive content — but it also says Teen Accounts are “currently only available in some locations” and are rolled out one teen at a time, so do not assume your child has one. These are the settings worth checking either way, under Settings & privacy › Settings › Audience and visibility.

• Private profile (friends only) for future posts, and review who can see past ones.
• How people find and contact you › “Who can send you friend requests?” — the only two choices Facebook offers are Everyone and Friends of Friends.
• The phone/email setting is no longer a simple lookup toggle. It is now “Who can Facebook suggest your profile to based on your phone number or email address”, with separate settings for the email address and the phone number, and four options: Possible Connections, Friends of Friends, Friends, or No one. “No one” is available and is the tightest.
• There is no face-recognition setting to turn off any more — Meta withdrew the feature and says the setting “is no longer available and the experiences it made possible have been disabled”. Older advice telling you to switch it off is describing a menu that has gone.
• Run Privacy Checkup (Settings & privacy › Privacy Checkup) once a year. It walks through who can see future and past posts, who can send friend requests, and the phone/email setting above.
• Marketplace requires an adult account. Facebook’s stated rule is that to access it you must “be an adult (example: at least 18 years old in the United States)”, so a teenager is not an eligible user at all. If your child is on it, they are using an account that misstates their age, which is worth understanding before you discuss the scams below.

Meta’s Family Center

Family Center is where a parent manages supervision of a teen on Facebook and Messenger; Instagram supervision lives in the same hub at familycenter.meta.com. Both of you have to agree to it, either of you can remove it at any time, and it ends automatically at 18. You can see daily and average time on Facebook for the past 7 days, set daily limits and sleep mode, see the friends list and who your teen has blocked, see and manage their privacy settings, and be notified when they change a safety setting or file a report. Meta is explicit about the limits too: you cannot read your teen’s messages, view their search history, or post as them.

Real risks

• Marketplace scams targeting teens buying sneakers, concert tickets, or game codes.
• Old public posts — old posts from middle school can resurface at college application time.
• Fake “friend” accounts cloned from real friends’ profiles.