Parents
Parent's Guide to Making Instagram Safe for Teens
Parents can use a combination of built-in features on Instagram and third-party apps to monitor activity on Instagram.
Are you worried about who your teen is interacting with on Instagram? Or whether or not they are accessing inappropriate content? As a proactive parent, you should know how to ensure your child is using Instagram in a safe way. In this guide, we'll show you how to monitor Instagram so that your child's Instagram use is fully transparent. Additionally, you'll learn some parental control techniques for automatically hiding explicit content on Instagram.
Why Instagram can be a Risk for your Teen
Instagram has been scrutinized in the news due to the risks posed to teens. From our perspective, most of these issues can be solved simply by ensuring transparency when your child uses the app.
Instagram might show Inappropriate Content to Teens even with restrictions correctly enabled
Your child can access a public feed of videos shared by users outside of their friend group. As a result, they might see inappropriate or suggestive videos, and while the chances of this can be reduced with Instagram's sensitive content controls, it's not a perfect solution.
Parents cannot view private message content
Instagram allows parents to have some visibility into their teen's account and supervise their teen's Instagram account. While supervision helps parents spot strangers who have reached out to their children, Instagram does not allow parents to view the contents of any messages sent to or by their child.
For many parents, this just means that they need to change how they approach parental controls on Instagram. Instead of scanning messages, keep an eye out for accounts you don't recognize or consider a third-party app to monitor content on your teen's smartphone.
Multiple accounts can make monitoring difficult
It's easy for Instagram users to create new accounts using a username of their choosing.
This creates two major challenges for parents:
- It's difficult to know who your teen is interacting with since profiles may not match real identities
- Your teen could create an Instagram account that you don't know about without parental controls and oversight
Fortunately, if the device your teen browses Instagram on uses a screen accountability app, you won't have to worry about multiple accounts.
Setting up Instagram's parental supervision for best results
Instagram's version of parental controls is called Parental Supervision. It limits how certain privacy restrictions can be changed on a Teen's account, and allows a parent to have more insight into who their Teen is contacting and being contacted by.
For the best results, here's how to set up parental supervision.
If you don't have an account, you'll need to create one. Otherwise, ensure that you're logged in with the correct on if you have multiple accounts.
Once your Teen is invited through Instagram, you'll be able to manage settings by going to your profile > More > Family Center. See the image below:
Sleep Mode lets you set hours during the day when your Teen is allowed to use Instagram. You can choose to either remind your Teen that time is up or block Instagram; we recommend setting this to "Block Teen from Instagram" instead of "Remind Teen to Close Instagram."
Account privacy is set to Private for Teen accounts by default, although this can be changed before Parental Supervision is enabled. Double-check this by going to their profile > More > Account Privacy (you can also view this from your Instagram account from Family Center).
Threads and Instagram's privacy settings could be different:
Set up additional supervision restrictions depending on where you live
Some States or regions have rules that Instagram must abide by that work in parents' favor. If you live in one of these regions, then you can add more controls to your Teen's account.
These features are only available if you live in one of these regions:
- Florida
- Connecticut
- Texas
- Puerto Rico
- Indonesia
- European Union
See Instagram's help center for more information about setting up these restrictions based on your region: https://help.instagram.com/252324384605131/
How to review your Teen's activity on Instagram
To review your Teen's activity on the Instagram app, go to your profile, then choose More > Family Center. Instagram allows parents to view details about how much time their Teen spends on Instagram, as well as view who their Teen is following and which accounts are following their Teen.
If you want to see a full breakdown of all activity on a child's iPhone or iPad, you'll need to use a screen monitoring tool like LivingRoom for Families , which captures all app and website activity.
Monitor what your Teen Sees on Instagram
Parents can use Parental Supervision on the Instagram app to view their Teen's contacts, although they can't see private messages. Parental control apps that actively monitor your child's smartphone screen are far more effective and cover many gaps in Instagram's parental controls.
View Contact List for your Child in Instagram
Monitor Messages and Content Viewed By Your Teen on Instagram
Instagram's parental controls give parents more visibility into who their Teen is interacting with, but there are cases where parents would like more visibility. While how Instagram implements Teen accounts could be updated later, it's extremely unlikely that parents can view messages.
If your child is using an iPhone, then finding a reliable app from the App Store can be difficult. We've written a dedicated guide for parents about how they can monitor their child's iPhone that goes into much more detail about how to do this effectively.
If your child is using an Android smartphone, you have a few more parental control options available from Google's Play Store. We've also written a dedicated guide for enabling parental controls on Android smartphones.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can comments be filtered on Instagram for my Teen?
Parents can use Instagram's parental supervision to review their Teen's Hidden Words setting and ensure comments containing certain keywords are hidden.