I’m fine with my younger daughter scrolling through her feed to look at art and animal videos, but I am super uncomfortable with the idea of strangers being able to reach her through direct messages. I’ve dug through the parental supervision tools built into the app, but everything I see just lets me monitor her activity rather than disable the messaging feature itself. Does anyone know of a workaround or a setting I might have missed that completely removes or locks down the inbox icon so she can’t open her DMs at all?
Good news — Instagram actually has a legit way to handle this if your daughter is under 16. If you set her account up through Instagram’s Family Center (supervision feature), you can limit who can message her or turn off DMs from people she doesn’t follow, and on teen accounts Instagram has been automatically restricting messaging from unknown adults.
The most airtight move though is just setting her account to private + messaging limited to “people she follows” in Settings → Messages → Message Controls — that cuts out basically all the random stranger DM risk without needing a third-party app.
If you want the inbox icon completely gone, that’s not really doable natively, but some router-level tools like Circle or your phone’s screen time settings can block the Instagram DM URL paths — bit of a pain to set up but it works.