Meta is putting Instagram users under 18 into new “teen accounts” to give parents more control over their activities, including the ability to prevent children from using the app at night.

In an announcement that comes a week after the Australian government proposed restricting children’s access to such platforms, Meta says it is launching teen accounts for Instagram that will apply to new users. The setting will then be rolled out to existing teen accounts over time.

Changes to teen account settings include giving parents the ability to set daily time limits on app use, block teens from using Instagram at certain times, see which accounts their child messages, and view the categories of content their child views.

Teens who sign up for Instagram are already subject to the strictest privacy settings by default. For example, adults are not allowed to message teens who don’t follow them, and notifications are muted at night.

However, under the new “teen account” feature, users under 16 will now need their parents’ permission to change those settings, while 16-18 year olds who use the new features by default can change them on their own. If a child under 16 tries to change their settings, the parental controls will let adults set new time limits, block access at night, and see who their child is messaging.

This comes after the Australian government announced last week that it plans to introduce legislation to parliament before the end of the year to raise the minimum age at which children can access social media to an as-yet unspecified age of 14 to 16.

But unlike other measures the company has taken recently – including allowing users in the EU to opt out of having their data used to train its AI model, but not offering a similar option in Australia – Meta’s measure is global and will apply to the US, UK and Canada, in addition to Australia.

Antigone Davis, Meta’s global safety director, said the decision to introduce teen accounts was driven by parents and not by government legislation or proposals.

“Parents all over the world are thinking about these issues,” Davis told Guardian Australia.

“The technology is pretty much ubiquitous right now and parents are thinking about it. From a youth safety perspective, it really makes the most sense to think about these things globally and address the concerns of parents globally.”

Davis didn’t rule out Facebook making the same changes in the future, but said the company will explore what measures make sense for different apps.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the main motivation for the policy to raise the age at which teenagers can access social media was to give them “real-world experiences”.

“Well, what we want to do is get our kids off their devices and onto the football pitch or the netball courts so they’re interacting with real people and having real experiences,” he told Channel Seven’s Sunrise program. “And we know that social media is causing social harm.”

But Davis said teens would also see social media as a source of “real-world” experiences for them.

“For the teenager who plays soccer and is on the soccer team and is trying to perfect a certain kick or a certain pass, they will use social media to figure that out, and in a way that maybe we wouldn’t have, and in a way that’s the real value,” she said.

“I think they move much more fluidly through these apps and their online and offline worlds. I don’t think they make that distinction.”

If Australia’s proposal goes ahead, the country could be among the first to implement a ban. British technology minister Peter Kyle said last week that he was keeping a close eye on how the Australian model might work and was open to the question of whether the UK might follow suit in the future.

Existing private account settings for teens that are being ported over to the new teen accounts feature include requiring under-18s to accept new followers, being placed in the most sensitive content restrictions, and filtering offensive words and phrases in posts.

The changes also come after Nick Clegg, a senior manager at Instagram’s parent company Meta, said parents weren’t using parental controls.

“One of the things we’ve found is that even when we build these controls, parents don’t use them,” he said last week.