Parents often seem to worry about their children using the internet, whether that’s from a security perspective or whether it’s just wanting to encourage them to get out from in front of the screen and spend more time outside.

Both Apple OS X and Microsoft Windows include some form of parental control and I’m going to have a quick look at OS X today and in other posts I’ll look at the Windows offering as well as some other options.

You may know from other posts that I am a hardcore Windows user, and for the sake of this article I should also say I’m the father of two, ranging from 7 years to 3 years old, both of whom use computers frequently for various tasks.

Apple is known for making their computers very usable and accessible. From a parent’s stand point, the Apple Parental Control feature is, in one word, brilliant. It really is well featured, well thought out and, more importantly, compared to the Windows version feels like it’s made by parents with both parents and children in mind.

Site blocking
With OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) you are able to create a standard user account and restrict it using Parental Controls in a number of ways. One of the biggest features is the ability to enable adult website blocking. This attempts to prevent your child from accessing sites which are considered adult, and it does a good job. We pointed it a number of obvious adult sites, as well as ones which were less easily identified as adult in nature and OS X blocked them all. However it isn’t capable of blocking legitimate sites which host adult content; for example YouTube which has some very graphic videos on it.

Blocked site warning

You can also override these settings if you need to and allow access to certain sites, or manually add sites to be blocked, should you feel that it’s not being cautious enough. In addition to that, if you are so inclined, you can view which sites your kids are visiting as well as which ones were blocked.

Time restrictions
When it comes to what times your child can use the computer, Apple have taken a really good approach, and one that many parents will really appreciate. Rather than saying when kids can use the computer, you choose how long each day they can use, and OS X takes care of the rest. You can specify the amount of time they can use the machine each day, with a separate entry for weekends. Finally there is a Bedtime setting which prevents late nights chatting to friends.

Time restrictions

Child friendly
Another feature which I really like is that you can enable a Simple Finder mode. Finder, for those that don’t use Macs yet, is Apples version of Explorer in Windows, the mechanism by which you interact with your computer, find files, preview documents etc. Complex computers require complex ways to access data and while Apple does a good job of simplifying that it’s still not simple enough for little fingers and young minds. With the simple finder enabled your kids get a very basic set of icons on the dock allowing access to Applications, Documents and Shared locations. The Applications window shows only the apps you have enabled. That’s it. Nothing else is needed, just three icons and the machine is theirs.

Simple finder for smaller children

As someone who actively wants to encourage their children to use computers as the amazing technical tools they are I think that the ability to give them a simplified interface is just superb. Young kids want to feel in charge and want to think that they know what they are doing. This way they can feel that they are still the boss while you know that they can’t do anything wrong.

It’s fair to say that Apples Parental Controls have surprised me. They really do provide features I wasn’t expecting to see. However they still don’t go as far as I would like, particularly in the website blocking area, and that’s why we’ll be looking at some more options later on.