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Parental Controls on the Mac sucks. For my use case, anyway. I need to block a small number of sites (like youtube) and clearly adult sites as well. Parental Controls as a minimum blocks any https site in existence, including google, facebook, etc. and you need essentially approve every web site they go to which is wasting a lot of time.

Do know how to make Parental Controls on Mac really work, or what other product can be used for this purpose?

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  • This is a shopping question and may not last long, but I use OpenDNS (free) to manage access at home... Handles per-site filtering and works on all devices
    – Brian Adkins
    Commented Nov 17, 2013 at 4:14
  • Thanks @BrianAdkins. Does OpenDNS allow different settings per client computer?
    – Sasha O
    Commented Nov 17, 2013 at 18:09
  • Unfortunately, no, but, if you want a non-filtered computer, just set its DNS to that of your ISP (or Google's DNS). Set your router to use OpenDNS, and all other connected devices should be protected
    – Brian Adkins
    Commented Nov 17, 2013 at 20:21
  • Dunno about the Mac proper, but they definitely suck on iOS. OpenDNS is great but lacking a major feature in not being able to have tailored 'accounts' with different levels of access. Another option to investigate is hardware-based solutions like Pandora's Hope (pandorashope.com) although the religious aspect of that would put me off, frankly.
    – Alan B
    Commented Dec 19, 2013 at 9:45
  • The Mac parental control software is merely exposing to the parent the ugly truth that other parental control software tries to hide from you. None of it works. There are billions of web pages, changing all the time, and no one can actually categorise them all as child-apprpriate or not. You can either give your children a very restricted white-list of a small handful of websites and block everything else (until they work out how to bypass it, which will at least be educational for them), or you can accept that they're going to see content that you wouldn't want them to see.
    – Mike Scott
    Commented Jul 4, 2014 at 7:03

3 Answers 3

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That all SSL connections are blocked by OSX Parental Controls is apparently a bug, not a feature. There is a discussion in the Apple Support Communities (an HTTPS page, ironically). The best help in there comes from this CNET article.

To summarize, possible solutions are

  • resetting the filter setting by deleting /Library/Managed Preferences/<user>/com.apple.familycontrols.contentfilter.plist

  • promoting the affected account to Administrator and demoting it again

or (least desirable)

  • creating a new managed account to be parentally controlled.
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Eventually I installed NetNanny for Mac and it does exactly what I need without wasting a lot of my time. You can turn off the HTTPS blocking. Remote administration via Web makes it easy to set up and monitor.

EDIT: Actually, NetNanny for Mac is done by another company, http://intego.com . I have installed the latest version of it and it kinda works, except one important part: it cannot block SSL web sites, just like Apple Parental Control. Which makes site blocking totally useless.

Since then, I have replaced this Mac by a PC and I should say, the built-in family safety features of Windows 8 are pretty good and do what I need without much trouble; you can see that Microsoft cares about this area of the product.

I am big fan of Mac myself but it's a pity to realize that in the area of kids safety, Mac OS is so lame as compared to Windows :-(

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I use free parental control software for Mac OS X - http://www.widestep.com/elite-keylogger-mac

Free tool easily records everything a Mac user types on the monitored computer. Easily capture what they are emailing about, discussing on chats, entering into web-forms. Elite Keylogger for Mac captures all texts copied to clipboard. Elite Keylogger provides complete visual log of what was happening on your Mac by taking desktop screenshots at configurable timeout. Elite Keylogger for Mac silently delivers recorded logs to your email address remotely.

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  • How to use this tool to solve OP's problem?
    – gronostaj
    Commented Dec 19, 2013 at 10:49

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