The parental controls feature on your Mac allows you to put restrictions on your accounts on your Mac. The feature lets you decide what a particular user account can do and cannot do on your machine. Basically, it is a way for you to keep your Mac protected from unsavory activities.
If you have multiple accounts on your Mac, you might have already enabled the parental control feature for those accounts. And now, if you have just created a new account on your Mac and wish to apply the same parental controls, you can use the Mac’s Copy Parental Controls feature to copy the settings from one account to another.
Copy Parental Controls from One Account to Another on a Mac
You are going to use the System Preferences panel to do the job.
Click on the Apple logo in the top-left corner of your screen, and select the option that says “System Preferences…”
When the system settings panel launches, click on the option that says “Parental Controls.” That is where you can manage the parental controls for various accounts on your Mac.
Click on the padlock icon in the bottom of the panel, then enter in your admin username and password and click on “Unlock” to be able to modify the parental control settings.
Click on the user account you have already enabled in the Parental Controls.
Once you have selected an account, click on the settings icon on the bottom and select “Copy Settings for [username]” (where username is the username of the account you have selected).
Select the newly created account that you wish to copy the parental control settings to. Single-click on the account, and it will be selected. Then click on the button that says “Enable Parental Controls.”
After the Parental Controls are enabled for the new account, click on the account name in the list to select it, and then click the settings icon in the bottom and choose “Paste Settings to [username].”
When the settings have been pasted, click on the padlock icon in the bottom to prevent any further changes.
Conclusion
If you wish to apply the same set of parental controls that you already have for one account to another account on your Mac, the guide above should help you do that.
Mahesh Makvana is a freelance tech writer who’s written thousands of posts about various tech topics on various sites. He specializes in writing about Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android tech posts. He’s been into the field for last eight years and hasn’t spent a single day without tinkering around his devices.
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