We investigate how to create a mobile social application to support families with elementary school children, assisting them in exploring their social and geographical environment (for example by helping them staying safe, making new friends or getting to know their neighbourhood). Existing social applications such as Foursquare, Twitter and Life360 already provide functionality that supports these tasks to some extent. However, while promoting important user values such as safety and family security, these applications can negatively impact other values such as privacy and independence. This stems from the fact that people’s values play out differently with varying family situations and social contexts, which current social applications cannot accomodate. In this paper we investigate how social applications can become more adaptive in order to provide value-sensitive support to families. We propose as a solution that users should be able to express rules of behavior (norms, viewed as concretized values) to the social application, mirroring real-life social norms. In multi-agent systems reseach various generic models have already been proposed for expressing social norms, but it has not been investigated how these can be used for influencing the behavior of social applications for families. We develop a tailored normative model in three steps: 1) identification of important family values in this application domain, 2) analysis of current capabilities of social applications in terms of norms, showing that they lack expressivity on several dimensions (such as context-sensitivity) which negatively impacts family values, and 3) a normative model that provides the required expressivity. We evaluate the model through a qualitative user study with parents and children, showing that their requirements for the behavior of the social application can be expressed using our normative model.