Instagram - teen supervision

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you have teen supervision on your kid's account, do you ever log in as them to see what they're doing on there? Check their messages? My 15 year old just got an account, so I'm trying to learn how to help manage beyond limiting time allowance per day and who can contact her. If I log in as her, will she know? I know her username and password, but that feels intrusive. What do you do?

My kid is 15 and just got instagram this year, also a teen supervised account. The agreement was that I would have the login. I also have logins to his email accounts, social media, etc. and can spot check if I ever want to. I spot check on occasion and we have always talked a lot about internet safety. It has felt intrusive on the rare occasions I've logged in and checked things out, but the internet is a weird, often creepy place and we'd all feel a whole lot worse if something happened to him.

[Anonymous]

As a parent of older teens...we did a huge disservice to our kids when they were growing up with FOMO. They got snapchat instagram etc. Even with the safeguards that we as parents tried to use..there was no way to actually monitor anything without being in their accounts. The depression and anxiety these things caused..the social experiment for this generation in HS and college. Kids will ALWAYS find a workaround, create other accounts etc to keep parents eyes out of their business. They apps are addictive, they find you via email text etc to keep Turing to them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My teen only uses Instagram for her sports and to follow other people in her sport. We support her use of Instagram and don't monitor.

I don’t mean to be snarky- but if you don’t monitor how do you know what she’s doing?

Because we talk about it and I trust her.

you are so naive

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We had a catfishing incident my 14 DD ran into. She was really upset and scared and we reintroduced how important that she came to us.We as parents took over, reported, blocked etc. It ended fine in the end but scary for all

Monitoring matters less than having the connection, relationship, and trust that they will come to you if it something doesn’t feel right/goes wrong. This particular event happened in the course of a one night and the next morning unless we were monitoring daily morning and night, logging in as her, we would have not known via monitoring

We have a 1 hr time limit on all apps, waited to give her a phone until 8th grade and she’d only had IG for about 3 months when this happened, we’d waited on that too. She had a good digital literacy class at school, is otherwise bright and has good sense and we talked it many times in many situations.

We all to remember they have undeveloped brains and will make mistakes

This is so scary. I wish they would outlaw them until 16 or older like other countries

[Anonymous]

We didn’t know better and older kid had social media. Now, as an adult, he recognizes how addicting they are and sets time limits on his own. Sibling in high school does not have social media. If you are going to cave to societal pressure, I would probably opt for instagram with the ability to monitor.