My daughter is nine, and for months she’s been begging for an Instagram account. Recently, I caved in, and created an account in her name.
I see every message and every post – because I actually control it. I have her account logged in on my phone 24/7, so at the click of a button I can switch between my personal account and hers.
I used to use mine for my small home business, and it served me well. I became very savvy with how it worked.
I guess I’m lucky in this respect, because I knew how important it is to keep a good eye on my daughter’s account.
Her account is on private settings. I know the password, she doesn’t. I’m the one who posts her pictures and captions (obviously with her input). I’m usually the one who tells her when a friend has messaged her as she’s really not on it much.
But last week, I had an experience I can’t get out of my mind. It involved child pornography.
For context, my daughter’s account is predominantly used to message friends and share photos of her dance and acrobatic skills, skateboarding videos and some holiday snaps. She follows school friends and dance friends and the odd tween celebrity here and there. She only follows dance and acrobatic hashtags so that’s what comes up in her feed.
We have four rules, and they’re pretty simple:
- I log her in and out on her iPad.
- She does not post anything without my help/approval.
- Only positive talk/comments.
- I must approve every ‘follow request’ to make sure we know who they are.
She broke rule 4.
Top Comments
A great, scary, read, but timely. I too caved to allow my kids access to platforms their friends use as a way to share... it is the world we live in now and like it or not I think if we do it in a controlled environment it is better than having our kids sneak behind our backs and create their own accounts.
Thank you for sharing this story.
I thought the minimum age for an Instagram account was 14?
13. Either way, the writer's daughter shouldn't have been on Instagram to begin with.
There are millions of children on Instagram, unmonitored. The writer made a calculated decision to create a monitored account. Should we go back to teaching abstinence for Sex Ed also? I know I’d rather have a healthy and open relationship with my daughter about trust than ban her from something that all her peers have anyway.
Nice to be the perfect parent with perfect kids. My daughters are14 so over the prescribed age and got caught up in this it has very little to do with age and all to do with the creep behind the screens! But absolutely focus on the age.