First introduced in iOS 12 last year, “Screen Time” has traveled to Mac with the new macOS Catalina update. As part of Apple’s digital health push, Screen Time helps you keep a track of how you spend time on your Mac and other connected devices like iPhone and iPad. With comprehensive reports, it offers better insight into your app usage, how often you pick up your device, and the number of alerts you receive – which can go a long way in getting rid of Mac addiction or cutting down unnecessary usage. What’s more, you can also set up Screen Time for a child on your Mac so that you can keep an eye on the movies your little champ watches, the websites that he/she visits or even the games they play. With that said, in this complete guide, we are going to show how you can enable Screen Time to set up parental controls on Mac in macOS Catalina to bolster your digital health or reign in your smart kid.
With the introduction of macOS Catalina, Apple has replaced “Parental Controls” in System Preferences as those features have been included in Screen Time settings. Therefore, do not get confused if you don’t see the erstwhile Parental Controls icon in the System Preferences. So, first we will start by enabling Screen Time on macOS Catalina and then see how you can use it to set up parental control on your Mac.
Open System Preferences on your Mac by clicking on the Apple menu at the top left corner of the screen and choosing System Preferences.
Up next, configure all the following options in line with your requirements:
To set app limits, simply click on the plus button and then choose a particular app category like games, social networking, entertainment, etc. Then, click on Done to finish.
Once you have set up everything, tracking Screen Time usage on macOS Catalina becomes quite straightforward. You can use the App Usage, Notifications, and Pickups features located in the sidebar to check the respective information.
Restricting Content in Apple Music and Apple TV
That’s it for the parental controls part. As you can see, you can use Screen Time to control your child’s device usage quite minutely. However, what if you want to restrict not just the time but also the type of content your child can access. Well, in this section, we will show you how you can restrict explicit content based on rating in Apple Music and Apple TV.
Launch Music app on your Mac. Then, click on the Music menu at the top left of the screen and choose Preferences.
Open the Apple TV app on your Mac. Then click on the TV menu > Preferences > Restrictions tab. After that, click on the Lock button on the bottom left corner of the screen and then enter your username and password.
SEE ALSO: How to Sync iPhone and iPad with Mac in macOS Catalina without iTunes
