Instagram adds some much-needed parental controls to the app

Instagram has finally revealed its new parental control features. After abandoning its “Instagram for Kids” platform amidst public outrage, the platform has decided to add some parental controls to the existing app. Today, Instagram introduced the new Family Center.

Instagram’s Family Center is a new parental guidance hub. The hub helps parents monitor their kids’ social media usage.

According to a blog post on Meta’s website, the new Family Center is available now to Instagram users in the United States. The feature will be expanding globally in the next few months.

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As of now, the Family Center contains a few features that aim to help parents supervise their teens on Instagram. Parents can see the amount of time that their kids spend on the platform. And they can get updates whenever their child reports an account.

Parents can even get updates from the app about which accounts their child is following. Or even which accounts follow their child.

The Family Center will expand in the coming months

But Instagram’s Family Center is still somewhat limited. For example, teens will have to be the ones to initiate supervision for now. The blog post says that parents will gain the ability to initiate supervision in June. And of course, teens will have to approve the supervision.

In addition to adding these new parental controls to Instagram, Meta also plans to bring similar features to its Quest VR headsets. These controls will begin to roll out in the coming months. In fact, the first change will be an improvement to the unlock pattern that currently exists coming in April.

If you have any questions about Instagram’s new Family Center, you can check out this FAQ page on the platform’s website. This seems like a good start for parental control options on Instagram, and it will be interesting to see how users feel about this new feature.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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