How can I manage who is able to talk to my teen on Kik?
Kik has been designed to give users full control over who can send messages to them. As a parent or guardian, you can make permission for your teen to use Kik conditional on the teen giving you access to their account. This will give you the ability to control who can send messages to your teen.
We recommend that you and your teen agree on the password to be used for your teen's Kik account, so you can access it anytime.
The password on a Kik account can be changed by going to our password reset website from a computer and entering the email address used to set up the account.
For more information on how to change a password, you can check out this FAQ.
Usernames
Unlike many other smartphone instant messengers, which are based on a users' phone number, Kik uses usernames to identify our users. Your teen's unique username is their identity on Kik.
If your teen hasn't registered their Kik account yet, ask them to choose a username that's hard to guess. The best usernames include a combination of letters, numbers, and some special characters, and ideally shouldn't be your teen's first and last name.
By using a username instead of a phone number, your teen's personal information (like their phone number and email address) is not shared by Kik. In addition, only people that your teen chooses to share their username with (either directly or by turning on the optional Address Book Matching feature outlined below) are able to contact them on Kik.
If your teen is an active user of other social apps and sites, they might choose to share their username on those sites to connect with their followers there. Remind your teen that posting their username somewhere like Twitter, or Instagram, etc., will make it publicly available. This means that people they don't know will be able to send messages to them.
Address Book Matching
The Kik app includes an optional Address Book Matching feature that users can turn on to help find their friends on Kik. The feature works by checking for accounts in Kik that match an email address or phone number stored in the user's address book (on their smartphone). If we find a match, we'll notify both users with a Kik message.
Choosing not to turn on the optional Address Book Matching feature will mean that only users who your teen chooses to share their exact username with will be able to send messages to them.
Blocking Users
Kik's 'Block' feature allows users to block all contact with another user, without revealing to the other user that they've been blocked.
This FAQ explains how to block someone on Kik.
Blocking someone on your teen's smartphone or iPod means that messages from the blocked user will be hidden, and all conversations with this person will be deleted from your teen's Kik app. The blocked user's name will no longer appear in your teen's list of contacts in Kik.
Ignore New People
The 'Ignore New People' feature allows users to hide messages they receive from people they've never talked to before, and turns off notifications for those messages. If your teen doesn't want to see inbound messages from people they don't know, they don't have to.
Here's information about how to use the 'Ignore New People' feature: Is there a way to manage messages from new people?