Do Parents need a Guide to Instagram?

The short answer is yes. If you didn’t already know, teenagers are able to sign up to Instagram from age 13 and with more teenagers signing up to Instagram every day, parents who don’t use the app might want to start getting to know what it is their sons & daughters are signing up for and how they can best protect them.

Luckily Instagram has recently released a guide to help Parents get their head around the ever-growing platform.

The guide for parents aptly named ‘A Parent’s Guide’ focuses on three things: how to manage privacy, interactions, and time on Instagram. As part of its bid to make sure the Instagram community is supportive and safe, the company has built tools that “proactively care for the people who use [its] products.”

With the guide, parents will be able to understand the basics around the app, the tools and be given a discussion guide for how they (parents/guardians) can have open and honest conversations with their teens, about Instagram.

The questions to help parents with discussions were developed “in collaboration with education and social media expert, Ana Homayoun, M.A., P.P.S.” with the idea being to help parents know that their teens are using the app in a positive way.

The US-based app collaborated on the guide with multiple organisations to make it a well-rounded piece which addressed any concerns parents might have. This included; The National PTA, Scholastic, ConnectSafely, National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI), National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA), GLSEN, Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, PFLAG, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Girl Scouts of the USA, and PACER’s National Bullying Prevention Center.

Is the guide useful?

In our opinion, it is especially if you are someone who has never used Instagram or rarely use it. The guide gives you an opportunity to get a better understanding of how your child is using the app, their interests and how you might be able to protect them should they need it.

For those who use it regularly, it might reveal a few tools within the app that they were not aware of before.

We think the biggest issue, however, isn’t whether the guide will be useful but whether it will be easy to get to for parents who are trying to find information about Instagram relevant to them which is why we chose to do this piece today.

Know a parent that could use the guide? Share our post.

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