Naven
Answers
What is a good messaging app for a family with young children?
One where strangers cannot initiate contact and where a parent does not have to read their child's messages to know they are safe. That means no public directory, no stranger DMs, and screening that runs before delivery.
The instinct is to reach for a monitoring app, and it is usually the wrong tool. A child who knows a parent reads everything moves to a platform the parent does not know about, which is a worse outcome than the one being prevented.
The alternative is a platform where the dangerous inputs are absent: nobody can find your child by name, nobody who is not already known can start a conversation, and the messages that would cause harm are stopped before they arrive.
Naven is built this way deliberately. Parents of under-18 accounts are involved through a guardian relationship and are told nothing about the content of conversations.