Instagram’s own rules say 13, so a 12-year-old on it is there with a date of birth that isn’t theirs. We’d wait until 16.
Most of what follows is Meta, the company that owns Instagram, describing its own app. Where someone outside Meta has tested it, we say so.
What does Instagram itself say?
13 is the minimum. Instagram’s rules don’t allow anyone younger, and Meta says it removes accounts it finds belong to under-13s.
In practice, getting past it takes one lie at sign-up. In April 2026 the European Commission, which enforces the EU’s online safety law, said in a preliminary finding that Meta does too little to keep under-13s off Instagram. Researchers testing the app in 2025 found it recommending Reels of children who said they were as young as six.
Why wait until 16?
Because Instagram’s protections loosen at 16, and the ones before that don’t work as well as Meta says. On the Wired Parents scorecard Instagram has the best parental controls of any social app, but it rates high risk on privacy, data collection, bullying and how open Meta is about all of it. A Teen Account narrows what a child sees and who can reach them. It doesn’t change what Instagram is: a feed built to keep them scrolling and a place to be compared with everyone they know.
What does a Teen Account do?
Everyone under 18 is put into one automatically. By Meta’s description:
- Private by default. Only followers the teen accepts can see their posts.
- Messages only from people they follow, with suspected nudity blurred in messages.
- A 13+ content setting, which Meta says is modelled on film ratings, plus a stricter Limited Content option for parents.
- Sleep Mode, which mutes notifications overnight.
- Parent permission for under-16s. A teen under 16 can’t loosen any of this without a parent’s say-so, through supervision you set up from your own account.
At 16, the teen can change most of it themselves unless you’ve set up supervision.
Does it work?
Less well than promised. In 2025, Arturo Béjar, a former Meta safety lead, tested 47 of Instagram’s teen safety tools with researchers at NYU and Northeastern University and child safety groups including the Molly Rose Foundation. They found only 8 worked as Meta described. The rest were flawed, ineffective or gone. Their test teen accounts were shown sexual, violent and self-harm content, and recommended adult strangers to follow.
Meta said the report misrepresents how its tools work, and that teens in Teen Accounts see less sensitive content and get less unwanted contact. It has fixed at least one problem the testers found: adults being able to message teens who didn’t follow them.
Where the law sets the age higher
In Australia, under-16s can’t have an Instagram account at all. The ban came into force in December 2025 and covers Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube and others. Several other countries have passed or are writing their own age limits. The Wired Parents country tracker shows where each one stands.
Where no law applies, Instagram’s 13 is the only line, and it’s yours to hold.
Questions like this one, answered every Thursday. Free.
If they’re already on it
Check the date of birth first. If Instagram thinks your child is 18, none of the teen protections apply, and nobody needs your permission for anything.
Then set up supervision from your own Instagram account. Without it, the under-16 permission rule has no parent to ask. Meta says supervision lets you set daily time limits, see who your child follows and who follows them, and approve or refuse changes to their settings. It doesn’t let you read their messages.
Supervision covers the account you know about. A second account, set up with a different date of birth, has none of it.
Send this to another parent on WhatsApp
See how Instagram rates at each age in the scorecard.
Checked 6 November 2026.
Sources:
- Meta, Introducing Instagram Teen Accounts
- Meta, 13+ content settings expanding globally, 2 June 2026
- European Commission, preliminary finding on Meta and under-13s, 29 April 2026
- Fairplay, Teen Accounts, Broken Promises, 24 September 2025
- Irish Examiner, Instagram’s safety tools still put children at risk (Meta’s response)
