Instagram invites parents and guardians to be more involved in their teens' online experiences through Family Center—a new hub for supervision tools and communication resources.
Available now in the US (and rolling out globally soon), Instagram's first set of supervision tools allow parents and guardians to view and set time limits, see who their teenager follows (and who follows them), and receive notifications when they report someone.
This isn't your typical parental control solution, though, and it's not as simple as opening the social network to view your kid's activity. Teens currently need to initiate supervision; Instagram plans to add a parental request option in June. Even then, young users must approve a parent or guardian's request.
"This is just one step on a longer path," Instagram head Adam Mosseri wrote in a blog post. "Our vision for Family Center is to eventually allow parents and guardians to help their teens manage experiences across Meta technologies, all from one central place."
The feature will roll out to Meta's VR Quest platform "in the coming months," first allowing parents to prevent teens from accessing age-inappropriate content, then automatically blocking users aged 13 and up from downloading unsuitable apps. A Parent Dashboard, meanwhile, will host a suite of supervision tools that link to the teenagers' account.
The boosting of parental controls is part of Meta's response to criticism that it doesn't do enough to protect young people on its platforms. In 2021, the company introduced a slew of features aimed at teenagers—including restrictions on adult interactions, default private accounts for kids under 16, and prompts that nudge you to "take a break" from the app.
At the urging of the National Association of Attorneys General, Instagram in September announced it would "pause" work on a controversial standalone kids app, instead folding some planned features into its main platform.