All the kids are going to hate me for this one. Mac OSX has some very nice parental controls right out of the box, and I want to show you how to set this up for your kid’s computer. The prereqs are that you need the kid’s computer and you need to have admin rights on that computer. The rest after the break.
Step 1 is to save all the files your child has in their documents folder. Remember what their login name is. You then need to create an admin account on their computer and a standard user on their computer with the login name and information. Log into the new admin account. Delete their old admin account. This is because you probably let your kids have admin rights over their computer. That’s never a good choice. If I was a kid nowadays, I would be looking at all the porn sites.
In fact you should never be using the admin account for anything other than administering the computer. That means you should have a normal user account on your computer. That account is the one that you work with. This above screen shot shows you the accounts preferences pane.
While logged into the computer as the admin bring up parental controls in the system preferences pane. For very young, or untrustworthy children click use Simple Finder, and then limit to what applications they can use. Turn off or on what you will let the kids do in the system. section.
You next can limit what words they can look up the dictionary, et al. You can also set up a blacklist of websites, or a white list of allowed websites.
This part of the controls is the most important in my opinion. This allows you to set up who your child can send email to, and even causes a permission email to be sent when the child wants to email to someone not on the list.
This part of parental controls seems to be the least ruffling for people. It is when the computer can be used and how much time allotment they have on it. Seems when the computer does the limiting, Junior obeys.
The last part of the parental controls is actually a log of how the computer is used. You should review the logs of the computer occasionally. I also recommend changing the admin user’s password regularly as well. This is how my Sister looks omniscient to my nieces.
I hope you enjoyed this look into how to setup parental controls for your child’s account.
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