I am wondering if anyone has any tips for parental controls for parents?
I’m talking about parents who are senior such as my 89 year-old father-in-law. At that age of course brain function declines as do motor skills. I’ve spent a surprising amount of time lately undoing many things that he is not sure that he has done! Last night he somehow managed to wipe all of his email. **
I had a very quick look at the TidBITS forum and didn’t see similar thread. This sounds like an article that Adam would have writtent… He’s using a Mac as well as an iPhone and the Mac is a vital connection for him to the outside world.
I can log into his Mac at any time but I’m wondering if there are some parental controls I should now be thinking of, having never really dived in to these. I think after last night’s effort he probably won’t mind me doing so.
TIA
Rob
**Figured he just had a filter on or the emails were in the 30 day trash, but no, they were goneburger. We had to go to the SMTP server to grab the backup from the day before.
It would help a bit if you told us which applications he uses.
My experience, based on my mother-in-law, is that things happened because of a finger accidentally triggering a right-click. Maybe a thing you could discuss with him is to use ctrl-click + mouse-click?
Which Mac is it? If it has a trackpad, look at System Settings> Trackpad. Any setting that he does not know about and use, turn off.
Setting up a good backup solution would be my first priority. It would have to be one that just works.
The first thing I’d do is make sure his login account doesn’t have admin privileges.
True Story: Back in the pre-OSX days, I had a relative who was very bothered by the Finder’s bulging Trash Can. He always immediately emptied the Trash when he deleted a file. No safety nets for him! He also didn’t like seeing any file whose purpose he didn’t know, so apps and files were always at risk unless I locked them down. More than once he called me with the “problem” that his computer wouldn’t let him delete the System Folder.
One thing that really helped was getting him to mostly stay in the old At Ease launcher instead of using the Finder.
Thanks for answering. He’s using a hand-me down MacBook Pro 13". That replaced his MacBook Air which he complained that the keyboard was too small. Combine that with surprisingly large, wobbly fingers (he doesn’t have parkinson’s but you would think he does), typing is painfully slow. That doesn’t seem to bother him as he’s never in a hurry, just tries our patience while we are waiting for him to finish
Apps used are Apple Mail, Safari, Chrome, Messages, Signal, Excel, Numbers.
The issue is not the typing, but actions he performs and can’t explain why he does them. Like the cleaning up all of his emails. And 2 months ago, he got sick of the spam so he deleted his gmail account and then wondered why he had no email.
I will double check that his account is not admin, I don’t think so, but I don’t think those are going to help some of the actions. I’m not even sure which parental controls will help. I haven’t spent much time with them, hence my question.
And I’m considering preventing him updating to MacOS 26. That will just confuse him.
Fortunately, he is very good natured and knows he is doing dopey things, so we just persevere.
I have experience helping older family members with various devices. One thing you might consider at this point is establishing fail-safes could be more effective than imposing limits.
For example, rather than trying to lock down Apple Mail and his email account, you could set up a filter that automatically forwards a copy of every email to another, single purpose email account you can access at any time.
Another thing to investigate is many companies, especially in financial services, allow a “trusted user” to be added to accounts. Trusted users typically have online access, under a separate user name and password, can receive statements and notices, and may be able to conduct transactions.
One more fail-safe to think about is, wherever possible, adding your devices/authenticator app/phone number as a backup 2FA channel.
Finally, some key hardware and software that I’ve found useful in managing others’ online activities:
1Password
Google Authenticator
Gmail
Time Machine, using a HDD/SSD with at least 3x capacity of the host system so that TM can keep extensive archives and to avoid running-out-of-space errors
Google Documents, to keep track of To-Dos and major changes made to accounts (for some family members I share responsibilities with a sibling so we’ve standardized on Google to make remote access easy for everybody)
For example, rather than trying to lock down Apple Mail and his email account, you could set up a filter that automatically forwards a copy of every email to another, single purpose email account you can access at anytime.
This sounds like a really good idea, because I’m not really sure we could lock down Apple Mail, anyway.
I think the trusted user idea could be useful with the banks. We already have power of attorney set up, so the banks would likely be keen to help out, I expect (sounds like atypical behaviour of a bank to be customer focussed, though they can be down here).
One more fail-safe to think about is, wherever possible, adding your devices/authenticator app/phone number as a backup 2FA channel.
Excellent idea, thanks.
1Password
I already control his 1Password, but even 1P is getting hard for him. I’ve reverted him to a password book for some things. I think I have managed to get him NOT put his passwords in a text document on his desktop, but you have to keep checking these things.
(funny story: he’s dutch and told me a couple of years ago he keeps his passwords secure…it took 30 seconds to expose them after I asked google translate for password in dutch…at the time, he conceded this was not secure at all).
Time Machine, using a HDD/SSD with at least 3x capacity of the host system so that TM can keep extensive archives and to avoid running-out-of-space errors
He has this set up, but is notorious for not plugging it in regularly. I might look into backblaze for him as he has quite fast internet.
