If you have small children at home and need to set up parental controls on the family Mac, here’s how to set them all up.
Parental controls are very important for kids as they protect them from all the weird stuff on the internet and keep them in line so they don’t spend all their time on the computer. The internet can be pretty addictive, and if you’re not careful, you could spend hours on Reddit looking at cats and funny memes. Fortunately for children, they have parents to punish them (no pun intended).
OS X has built-in parental controls that are pretty comprehensive and allow parents to limit their children’s computer time and which websites they can visit.
Here’s how to set up parental controls on Mac and protect your kids from all weird internet content.
Setting Parental Controls
Parental Controls in OS X are really easy to get to. All you have to do is open it and then click . From there, click the padlock in the lower left corner and enter your admin password to unlock access to parental controls.
On the left there will be a sidebar listing all user accounts on your Mac (except your own). Only the Guest account shows up for me, but I can still set parental controls for it and limit access to anyone who wants to use my computer.
Simply click on a user account and you can start installing and setting up different parental control options. There are five tabs at the top: Apps, Web, People, Time Limits, and Other. Here’s how these different partitions break down.
apps
This section is about what apps kids have access to, and you can also fool the Finder to make it easier for teens who don’t know much about OS X to use.
Parents can choose which apps from the App Store are available for download by selecting an age range from the drop-down menu on the right, and you can limit which apps your kids can access by playing with the arrows and checkboxes on the right. lower part of the window. You can set up access to App Store apps as well as other apps not downloaded from the App Store.
You can also limit access to Notification Center widgets and utilities.
network
The Web tab provides options to limit which websites children can and cannot access.
You can allow unrestricted access to all websites or let Apple try to automatically limit access to adult websites and if it provides false positives or allows a certain adult website to pass through you can further customize it and manually enter websites that pass through those websites . filter.
Also, you can only allow access to certain websites that you specify. Apple provides a list of recommended websites for kids, but you can customize it however you like.
People
This tab is about Game Center, sending emails and messaging with people. You can prevent your children from adding friends and participating in multiplayer games in Game Center.
You can also restrict kids from emailing and texting other people to a limited list of approved friends and family that they can email and send messages to through the Mail and Messages apps.
time limits
If you don’t want your kids to spend all their free time on the computer, this section allows you to set time limits.
You can set separate time limits for weekdays and weekends by specifying how many hours they get per day, and they will start when they reach that time limit for that day.
You can also set times during the day when your children are not allowed to access the computer at all, such as setting it so that your children leave the computer at 9:00 PM every night and cannot turn it back on until the morning.
Other
The final section is Other, which contains some miscellaneous items that you can restrict children’s access to.
Here you can disable the front-facing camera, dictation, and CD and DVD burning. It can also hide abusive words in the dictionary and prevent children from changing printer settings, etc. You can restrict printer access.