If you’re a parent, the internet can be a scary place.  Heck, if you’re not a parent, the internet can be a scary place.  Dubious web sites, strangers in chat rooms, kids (of all ages) using their computers at all hours of the day and night, for who knows what - we all know the drill.  What’s a concerned parent to do?

Parents spend big bucks each year to install third-party software trying to make the computers in their household “safe” for their children to use.  Apple’s new operating system, Mac OS 10.5 “Leopard”, includes a myriad of Parental Controls that give Mac using-parents added weapons in their war against “bad” computer use.

Setting up Parental Controls on a Mac, in typical Apple fashion, is a breeze.  Let’s assume you have one family iMac running Leopard.  You, as the parental unit, are the Administrator.  Now, don’t get flustered here when I talk about being the Administrator.  When you set up your Mac, out of the box, you became the Administrator.  If you’re setting up Parental Controls, you’ll need to make sure, however, that your kids don’t know your Administrator password, so they can’t use the “full” computer or make changes to your Controls.

Parental Controls takes advantage of Leopard’s multi-user capabilities.  You simply create a new user (through the System Preferences > Accounts tab).  We’ll call this user “Kids”.  Once you have established the Kids user account, you set up Parental Controls (there’s even a convenient button to take you right there).

You’ll notice five tabs on the Parental Controls preferences pane.  Through the “System” tab you can enable “Simple Finder”, which provides a simplified view of the Desktop for young or inexperienced users.  This keeps young or inexperienced fingers from creating chaos and havoc by deleting, say, needed system files (or, more importantly, something like your Quicken financial records).  You can also restrict the applications your Kids can use and whether or not they can burn CDs or DVDs.

Through the “Content” tab you can hide profanity in the Mac’s built-in Dictionary.  It works.  I tried to look up a certain popular juvenile epithet and found only entries like buck, duck, and funk.

You can also restrict access to websites with appropriate content or to only a list of websites of your choosing.  Parental Controls actually goes out ahead of your child to websites to see if they contain dubious content, then filters and restricts the bad stuff.  You can adjust the behavior of the content filters by adding sites you know you want to restrict and allow, similar to the spam filter in Apple Mail.

The “Mail & Chat” tab gives you the power to only allow email and chat conversations with you approved buddies.  You can even have Parental Controls send you an email (unbeknownst to the Kids) when they try to email or chat with a “stranger” not on your list.

The “Time Limits” tab lets you set hours-per-day use limits for weekends and weekdays, and school night and weekend “Bedtime” hours during which the Kids user cannot use the computer.

The “Logs” tab can show you every web site your kids visited or tried to visit, applications they used, and people they iChatted with for the last day to the last year.

As an added bonus, you can even administer Parental Controls from a “remote” Mac.  Say the kids have their own Mac upstairs.  You can control and monitor everything we’ve discussed from your downstairs Mac via your local network.  And, at any time, you can use the power of Leopard’s built-in Screen Sharing to peek in on the Kids’ Mac’s screen to see what they’re up to