There’s a good chance that even if you don’t know exactly what your teen has been looking at on Instagram over the past few years, you’ve felt its devastating effects.
Maybe your daughter has turned to you in tears and said, “I’m so ugly, aren’t I?” because the endless images of filtered perfection she sees don’t match what she sees in the mirror.
You may, like me, have been unable to get your child out of bed because they’d been up all night browsing on a phone you thought was safely charging in the kitchen.
So when it was announced this week that Instagram was taking radical steps to give parents control, you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief.
With immediate effect, “teen accounts” for under-18s will be introduced in the UK, Australia and the US. These accounts are automatically set to private, reducing the risk of being targeted by online predators. Parents have the option to see who they message and the topics they follow.
Instead of having to nag kids to quit social media, Instagram will send notifications to younger users if they’ve been on the app for more than an hour. Young people’s Instagram accounts will automatically be logged out between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
Of course, Instagram isn’t the only platform young people are using when they should be sleeping. They’re just as likely to be on YouTube, TikTok or Snapchat.
Now, if your child comes across disturbing content, these measures could make it seem like it’s your fault, too, for not taking full advantage of Instagram’s tools.
Are these finally the changes we’ve all been waiting for to keep our children safe? I’m afraid that while they are a step in the right direction, we’re not there yet.
On the one hand, it seems to me that you have just been hired as free labour by a multi-billion dollar corporation. Overnight, it is also your job to moderate your child’s use of Instagram. Is it a coincidence that this action comes at a time when Meta is increasingly in the crosshairs of global regulators and lawyers in the US, Australia and the UK?
Now, if your child does stumble upon disturbing content, these measures could make it seem like it’s their fault, too, for not making the most of their tools.
This week I checked my own Instagram for harmful content and it seems that, likely with the added help of AI, Instagram has finally moved past content in favor of anorexia, suicide, and self-harm.
Still, impressionable young people are still at risk of disappearing down unhealthy rabbit holes because as soon as they show interest in a topic (be it diets, videos of school fights, or false information), Instagram’s algorithm is likely to feed them more of it.
We also have to wonder why Instagram didn’t make these changes sooner. Back in 2019, notes were leaked showing that Instagram bosses were investigating the possibility that the platform could be toxic for teenage girls.
“We made body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls,” read one slide from an internal 2019 presentation, leaked to the Wall Street Journal, though Meta now insists it was taken out of context.
Now, governments and lawyers around the world claim that Instagram knew the harm it was causing to young people, but downplayed it for the sake of profits. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, is being sued by 41 US states as a result.
However, I am hopeful for the future, because I believe that young people themselves are the best force to confront social media companies.
A couple of months ago, I asked my daughter Lily, a 22-year-old student, if she would like to “like” some of my Instagram posts about my new book, because, ironically, I could use a little more engagement.
No, she replied. She had taken a month-long break from social media and deleted her Instagram app, because the comparison culture was stressing her out.
According to a study this week, 45% of Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) are working to reduce their screen time. Our children have been lab rats in a giant global social media experiment for far too long.
Our job as parents is to help them stop and notice for themselves how the slide into darkness really makes them feel.
- Tanith Carey is the author of What’s My Tween Thinking? Practical Child Psychology for Modern Parents with Dr. Angharad Rudkin (DK books).
But one Gen Z writer has a different verdict…
By Antonia Lenon
It’s a good thing that Meta is trying to give parents control over their teens’ Instagram activity, but it doesn’t address the platform’s fundamental problem.
Facebook, then Instagram, and now TikTok may market themselves as fun ways to connect with others, but in practice, because they encourage you to share a carefully curated version of your life, they’ve become about comparing yourself and competing with other people.
And a lot of it, because Instagram is all about images, comes down to how you look.
I’m 26 years old and my first social media account was Facebook. I signed up when I was 11 and in seventh grade. I quickly became obsessed with having a “perfect” profile picture.
This was an unfortunate pastime, as I was, and still am, incredibly unphotogenic. My best friend and I would take her dad’s camera to the park to try and get the perfect photo of each of us. We never quite managed it.
When I compared my photos with other girls, I felt like I had never looked so pretty.
The rise of Instagram in 2010 and TikTok in 2016 meant that this world of online comparisons suddenly became huge. Instagram allowed me, an average-looking 15-year-old, to compare myself to supermodels and other famous, beautiful women.
And while on Facebook you have just one profile photo, on Instagram it’s normal to upload dozens of artistic images of yourself.
When we were teenagers, my friends and I loved the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, a catwalk show created by the American lingerie brand featuring slim, scantily clad models. Thanks to Instagram, we were able to follow the supermodels who took part online.
Thus began an unhealthy stream of photoshopped content of these stunningly beautiful women.
Why don’t I look like that? I asked myself as I looked at her flawless photos. Why am I so short and flat-chested? Why is my hair such a boring color?
Instagram’s new policies allow parents to see who their children are communicating with online, but you don’t have to be messaging someone to feel this painful inadequacy.
Yes, the app is taking steps to limit the amount of darker content girls see — material that actively promotes eating disorders or self-harm. But “normal” content can also be devastating.
Since Instagram and TikTok are virtual spaces, I know it must be difficult for parents who grew up in a world without social media to fully understand what it’s like to use these platforms as a teenager.
If you think of them as a real place, like an after-school club, where a teenage boy could go and waste hours in the company of beautiful strangers and hear how amazing these women’s lives are, I don’t think you’d want them to be.
When I started college, I cried the entire welcome week because I couldn’t find friends right away. I remember sitting on my bed, exhausted and demoralized, and I opened Instagram. I came across pictures posted by my friends from school.
They seemed to be having a great time at their universities. They were posing with new friends, exchanging jokes in the comments, and just hanging out. I felt like I couldn’t tell any of them how hard I was finding it, I was embarrassed that I was struggling with something that all of them seemed to find easy.
I ended up having a great time at university and now I know from conversations we had years later that many of my schoolmates also had a really hard time in those first few weeks. The problem is that no one shares those difficult moments online. It’s all about keeping up appearances.
Nowadays, I still use Instagram, but I put limits on my interactions. I don’t deliberately follow supermodels like Kendall Jenner. I avoid the “explore” page, which tries to lure you into glossy content posted by people you don’t follow.
There’s a lot of valuable content on Instagram—cooking tutorials from top chefs, fabulous photography, and hilarious, relatable comedy—but teen girls entering this digital world for the first time need all the help we can give them to navigate it safely.
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