Instagram's Mother Child Method Explained
Instagram’s Mother Child method is easily one of the most effective and least known methods for growing an Instagram account by 1000s of followers every month. The Mother Child method is also referred to as the Mother Slave method. The growth promotion leverages 100s of slave/child accounts to promote the main account. The method started gaining underground popularity as early as 2018, and it has led to some insane growth on various accounts.
How does the method work?
The Mother Child method works by having 100s of child accounts send messages to the targeted followers of the mother account. When the potential follower sees the message, they have the option of following the mother account. The biggest benefit of this process is that each follower consciously chooses to follow the mother account rather than doing it out of obligation like most methods.
For more detail look at the diagram below to see exactly how the Mother Child method works.

The Secret Sauce
The boost in new organic followers from the Mother Child method often results in a huge push from the Instagram algorithm. This means you will get more reach for the photos, reels and IGTV videos you post on the feed. This feedback effect is what allows the explosive growth of some accounts to surpass even 10,000 followers per day.
How Many Followers Can I get With the Mother Child Method?
The number of followers gained from the method depends on several factors. It is however not uncommon for people to gain hundreds to thousands of followers per day. Check out this service for a better understanding of the typical results. The two major factors that determine the success of the Mother Child method are the number of optimized child accounts and the optimization of the mother account.
Number of Child Accounts
Typically, the more child accounts one uses in the promotion, the better the results will be. Each child account can send only a set number of messages per day; the more accounts you have, the more impressions your message gets. For this method to truly be effective, each child account needs to be optimized to appeal to the potential follower. Many Mother Child providers make the rookie mistake of using child accounts which are not well optimized, and hence do not convert into followers for the mother account.
For an effective campaign we recommend using anywhere from 50 to 200+ child accounts. The complexity and cost of the operation goes up as you use more child accounts, and it’s possible to reach a point of diminishing returns. The right number of accounts depends on the objective of the campaign.
The Optimization of the Mother Account
If the mother account is not optimized, people won’t follow. This part of the process is incredibly important, and often neglected by many Mother Child method service providers. The optimization of the mother account involves making it attractive to potential followers by cleaning up the feed, bio, and profile picture. If the content is not appealing, it doesn’t matter if you use 1000 child accounts, the results will not be optimal.
Below as an example of a message we recieved from someone utilising The Mother Child method.

Can the Mother Child method get your Instagram account deleted?
One of the most common questions asked is if the method can get your account deleted by Instagram. The method cannot get your account deleted by Instagram because the mother account does not need to do anything outside Instagram’s guidelines. The mother account does not need to put its password into any potentially dangerous software. No personal data needs to be exchanged as the method depends on other accounts to do the heavy lifting.
The only way your account can be deleted is if you do something against the guidelines whilst the campaign is operating. The deletion won’t be due to the campaign but your defiance of the rules. Long story short, the method is perfectly safe.
The same situation naturally happens on Instagram for many celebrities. Celebrities have thousands of fan pages created for them by their fans. Many of these pages link back to that celebrity’s main page. People constantly mention celebrities in direct messages, and no one has ever been deleted for this by Instagram.
How Does The Mother Child Method Compare to Other Instagram Growth Methods?
We believe the Mother Child method is one of the most effective ways to grow an Instagram account, but you might be wondering how it compares with other growth strategies. In this section we will objectively compare it to the main growth methods available.
Mother Slave vs Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are a great way to drive traffic to landing pages, especially story ads on Instagram. When it comes to growing followers on Instagram, Facebook ads can be effective abiding you are able to keep your CPC down and use the right targeting. The problem with Facebook ads for follower growth has to do with cost.
If you do not have prior experience running ads, you will likely make a lot of mistakes when optimizing for the right audience. Many of these mistakes can be avoided by hiring an agency; however, the monthly retainer for that endeavor typically starts at $997 (excluding ad costs).
Facebook ads allow for the best targeting out of all growth methods and have the best scaling capacity. The downside is their costs are often unpredictable, and trends show they have been increasing with time.
If you have a huge budget and the ability to make a return on investment via some backend product, then this might be a good solution for you.
For most people, the Mother Child method will prove to be superior because of the ability to get results in a more stable fashion. If ad costs double overnight and you maintain the same budget, you will get half the results. The likelihood of the Mother Slave method halving its performance overnight is pretty much zero.
The Mother Child method tends to convert better per impression as many people on Instagram simply ignore ads. Most people read their direct messages, and hence are more likely to see the mother account.
The Mother Child method also allows you to target niches which are prohibited for advertising by Facebook. Take for instance the weight loss niche, which has very strict advertising guidelines.

Mother Child vs Giveaways
Instagram viral giveaways are easily the most explosive way to grow an Instagram account. Depending on the giveaway you enter, you can gain anywhere from 1000 to 100,000 followers. The more expensive the giveaway spot, the more followers you typically get. Just like anything in life, giveaways come with a catch – the followers you gain might not be interested in your content. Followers from giveaways follow you because of the incentive to win the giveaway. If the follower doesn’t win, they might simply unfollow you.
Giveaways can ruin your engagement rate if you are not careful, which in turn can destroy the chances of your account ever being recommended by the Instagram algorithm. Giveaways tend to be better for people who need quick social proof but do not plan on growing their account organically.
Giveaways work very well when the page hosting the giveaway is in the same niche as the account participating in the giveaway. When this happens, you will have a higher follower retention and your engagement will stay healthy.
When you use the Mother Child method, you do not have to worry about a loss in engagement. All the people who follow the mother account are targeted. By following the mother account without incentive, they are signaling interest in the content. One of these followers is worth 5 untargeted followers.
Despite the Mother Child method not providing the instant follower growth from giveaways, this method, for most people, is better for long-term account health
Follow Unfollow vs Mother Child/Slave
What about the classic follow-unfollow method? You might be wondering how it stacks up against Mother Child. As we stated many years ago, the follow-unfollow method sucks. The method puts your account at risk because Instagram will give you many action blocks. If you keep doing the repetitive actions, your account could be at risk of deletion. Don’t even get us started about plugging your main account into a bot. Automation has become incredibly risky as Instagram’s AI algorithm has developed over the years. It will surely lead to your account being terminated.
You could get away with the method only if you do manual actions and follow just a handful of people per day. Clearly this method has a scaling issue as you won’t be able to reach even 200 people a day. The best result you will likely gain is 20-40 followers per day which is unremarkable.
Out of all the methods out there, this is likely the least effective for growing your account and gets smoked by the Mother Child method. Mother Slave can gain you 10-20x more followers whilst keeping your main account safe. There is no comparison because follow-unfollow is for those who have no budget for Instagram growth and are satisfied with sub-par results.
Best Instagram Mother Child Method Service
There are lots of Mother Child Instagram service providers on the market. Unfortunately, many of them generate poor or no results at all. For years we have trusted this team for our Mother Child operations. After trialing many other agencies, they proved to generate the most stable and genuine service.
If you want to use another team for your Mother Child service, make sure to check for the following conditions.
Results Screenshots
The team should have clear screenshots of their clients’ results. Testimonials are also a good indicator of an authentic service. A word of warning just be sure they are not fake.
Consultation
This service requires a consultation with the client so the service provider can create the best campaign possible. If a website is asking for your credit card before having talked to you, it likely is a scam or cookie-cutter campaign.
Reasonable Pricing
This service is not cheap, but it shouldn’t require you to sell your house just to pay for it. In the consultation, the service provider should be able to justify why their service costs what it does. If their setup is more expensive and creates consistent results, be prepared to pay more.
Our Recommendation
Once again, check out the Thrive team if you want a reliable service provider for the Mother Child method.
How can I set up the Mother Child Method for myself?
Although we highly suggest you use a respected service provider to run the Mother Slave method for you, it is possible to do the operation yourself. The difficulty comes in the complexity of dealing with numerous accounts all whilst keeping costs down.
There are two main ways of running the method: automation and human resources.
Manual Mother Slave Method
This involves you hiring micro workers to do the actions of the child accounts manually. The biggest benefit of this method is having stability in your growth. The stability comes from less action blocks, as Instagram is less likely to block actions from a real account operating on a mobile phone. Each worker will be given a set of accounts (source accounts) with which they manually follow the account’s followers, and then send messages that promote the mother account.
The Dark Side of the Manual Method
When doing this method manually, you run into some scaling issues. Your workers will have to keep track of the accounts they have followed and messaged to avoid sending double messages. Your employees will have to change the messages often as to not trigger action blocks from sending spam messages. Your employees will also need to be consistent whilst doing time-consuming, boring work.
This method can also get expensive as you will be using human capital to get the job done. This is a good strategy, however, for those wishing to grow a single account with a highly specialized niche.
Automated Mother Slave Method
The Mother Slave method is usually done through leveraging automation. The slave accounts are plugged into an Instagram automation software such as Jarvee or a private bot and set to do specific actions. When this method is done properly, the results can be spectacular and scalable. Using automation for Instagram has become incredibly difficult because of Instagram’s algorithm updates over the years.
Only a few service providers really know what they are doing and can be trusted with this method. We don’t advice you bother trying to run the Mother Child method if you haven’t already had some basic experience with Instagram automation.
Below are several things you will need to make the method work for you.
Instagram Accounts
You will need hundreds of Instagram accounts if you want to do this properly. Why hundreds of accounts? Because many of them will likely be deleted by Instagram, so you will need replacements.
There are two ways of getting accounts:
- Buying Accounts
You buy accounts from a seller on a marketplace and use them for your automation. The price of the accounts can be anywhere from $1 to $15 per account. The difference in price is based on how the accounts were created. Variables such as proxies used, associated email, and the age of the account can contribute to an increased price. Something as seemingly trivial as the account being created on an iPhone or Android device can impact the trust score of the account. The higher the trust score, the less likely the account will get deleted by the algorithm. No one knows for sure what the right ratio is for an account to last long, so you will have to do a lot of trial and error.
- Creating Your Own Accounts
Creating your own accounts is often a good solution because you will oversee every part of the process. It’s like having your own recipe; you can add and subtract whatever elements you like to better increase account life. The problem with this method is that it’s always changing. Instagram is constantly making it more difficult for people to create more than 5 accounts per device, so you will have to get crafty. Also, accounts created on mobile phones tend to have a higher trust score than accounts created on desktops. This approach can be rewarding but is often tedious and ever changing.
Scraper Accounts
Due to Instagram’s API blocks, the average account can no longer do as many actions as in the past. Certain accounts need to be used simply for the process of scraping followers for the child accounts to message. The quality of these accounts does not need to be as high as that of the child accounts which send the messages. These source accounts can be found through a variety of means when using software such as Jarvee.
Child Accounts
These are the soldiers doing the heavy lifting. These accounts do a range of actions such as posting images on Instagram, viewing stories, and messaging the source accounts to promote the mother account. There is no perfect way to set up these accounts, and you will have to experiment with a range of promotion tactics.
Some of the ways through which child accounts could promote the mother are:
- Direct messages
- Comments
- Tags in posts
- Tags in bio
- Story replies
The child accounts could have the profile picture of a normal person, or they could be niche specific to match the niche of the Mother account. This process takes a lot of trial and error.
Proxies
Another important consideration for running this growth method is the proxies that will be used on each account. This is very important to get right, because using the wrong proxies can lead to instant deletion of the child accounts.
There are three main proxy types:
- Datacenter
- Residential proxies
- Mobile proxies
Mobile or 4G proxies tend to be the safest proxies to use for this method, but they are also the most expensive of the bunch. The whole proxy business requires some reading and experimentation if you want to get it right.
Phone Verifications
Phone verifications are a security measure used by Instagram when they suspect suspicious activity on an account. To keep your accounts alive, you will need to think of a solution to your phone verification problems. The two main methods are the use of physical SIM cards in real phones, and online phone verification services.
The use of real SIMs is safer but also more tedious. You will have to keep 50 or more SIM cards in an organized manner and put them in a phone when you need to verify. Real SIMs give your account more trust as you won’t be sharing that number with anyone else (unlike the online services). You might also run into limits on the number of SIM cards you can buy in your country, so make sure you do your research.
Online phone verification services can work but will likely lead to your accounts having less trust, as these numbers are shared with hundreds of people daily. The whole thing will look sketchy to the Instagram algorithm.
VPS
To run the Mother Child method 24/7, you will need a VPS. A Virtual Private Server is a computer that you can access from your own system. The VPS operates all the time even when your main computer is turned off. When using a VPS, you need to ensure you have enough RAM and processing power for the amount of slave accounts you are looking to run.

Conclusions
The Mother Child/Slave method can provide some incredible results in terms of Instagram growth. Instagram has grown in popularity and it has become considerably more difficult to grow organically. This method can give you an enormous push for your brand. Setting the method up yourself can be done, but it is incredibly time consuming and complex. We highly suggest using a professional service provider for the best results. As Instagram’s algorithm grows in complexity, the method will only become harder to orchestrate. Those who can pull it off will continue to get the most explosive results on the platform.