Meta is giving parents more ways to supervise how teenagers use Threads in India and other Asia Pacific markets. The company has started rolling out parental supervision tools on Threads, allowing parents and guardians to view usage, set time limits, and manage several privacy and safety settings through Meta’s Family Center.
The rollout expands the parental controls already available on several Meta platforms. Threads' Teen Accounts also come with built-in protections, including private accounts and restrictions on the type of content teens can see.
With the new supervision tools, parents can get a better impression of how much time their teenager spends on Threads without having access to their private conversations.
Parents Can Set Daily Screen Time Limits
One of the key additions is the ability to monitor and limit the amount of time a teenager spends on Threads.
Parents using supervision can see how much time their teen has spent on Threads each day over the last week. They can also view the average daily usage for that period.
Parents can then set a daily time limit for Threads to be used. Once the limit is reached, access to the platform can be restricted. The limit is the teenager's total Threads usage on multiple devices rather than for each device separately.
Parents can also block access to Threads on certain days and hours. That could allow families to restrict access to social media during school hours, study time or other times when social media use is not allowed.
Sleep Mode Can Restrict Threads At Night
Meta has also enabled parents to control more of their nighttime usage of Threads' sleep mode.
Parents can limit or block their teenager’s access to Threads at night. When sleep mode is active, notifications are muted, and auto-replies are enabled by default between 10 PM and 7 AM.
As such, the feature would help parents establish boundaries around late-night social media use without having to manually monitor the app every night.
Meta has already introduced similar nighttime controls and reminders on other platforms. Its Teen Account system on Instagram, for example, features sleep mode and time-limit features designed to encourage teenagers to spend less time on the app at night.
New Privacy And Tagging Controls For Parents
The Threads supervision update also gives parents more visibility as well as control over some privacy settings.
Parents can choose who is allowed to tag their teenager in Threads posts. They can also control or approve certain privacy settings and sensitive-content preferences.
This builds on the existing protections provided by Threads Teen Accounts. Meta says Teen Accounts have automatic safeguards such as private accounts and restrictions on the content teenagers can access.
For teens under 16, parents can also decide if the teenager can change certain built-in safety settings to make them less restrictive.
The aim is to give younger users stronger default protections and let parents have a role in determining how a user will change the default settings.
What Parents Can See And What They Cannot
The new supervision system is designed to provide parents with usage information and controls instead of unrestricted access to everything a teenager does on Threads.
Parents can see daily time spent and average usage, set limits, control sleep periods, and manage selected privacy and content settings. The tools do not provide parents with a general ability to read their teenager's private messages.
This approach is consistent with Meta's broader parental supervision system. For instance, its Messenger supervision tools allow parents to see some information about how their teen uses the service without being able to read the teen's messages.
How To Set Up Threads Parental Supervision
Parents and guardians can set up Threads supervision through Meta's Family Center. Meta directs families to its supervision setup page for the process.
The rollout began across Asia Pacific this week and follows Meta's earlier announcement that Threads parental supervision would be expanded globally. Meta said on September 15 that parental supervision on Threads was starting its global rollout.
The latest update means parents in India now have another set of tools for managing their teenagers' social media use. With screen time monitoring, daily limits, nighttime restrictions, tagging controls, and selected privacy settings available in one place, Threads is bringing its parental supervision features closer to the controls already offered on other Meta platforms.
For families, the tools offer a way to establish boundaries while also helping teenagers to stay on the platform within age-appropriate safety settings.
