MacOS – Cannot disable parental controls for Admin user

administratorhigh sierramacosparental-controls

I wanted to put parental controls on my computer before I learned that administrator users can't have parental controls (makes sense to me now). But somehow I still managed to enable parental controls for my administrator user, and it didn't give me any warning message.

I can tell that enabling parental controls really did work because some websites are blocked. This persists even after rebooting my Mac.

Now I want to turn off parental controls, but I can't do it. When I try to turn it off in System Preferences, I get this error message (video):

You cannot enable parental controls for an administrator account. Create a new user account, and then enable parental controls for the new account.

So how can I turn off parental control for the Admin user?

Best Answer

I found a solution thanks to @nohillside, I created a new admin user, loged out of the old one and loged into the new one but I was not able to downgrade the old admin account to standard, so I did this :

dscl . read /groups/admin GroupMembership

then

sudo dscl . delete /groups/admin GroupMembership Anakojm

Then I restarted my mac and created a stantard user with the same name (Anakojm) and I get this message :

A home folder named Anakojm already exist use it ?

Then I clicked yes and disabled parental control, and upgraded it again.

Related Solutions

MacOS – Steam under Parental Controls

Steam has an automatic updating system. Games, and even the steam client will update automatically, if you are connected to the internet.

What seems to be happening to you, is that one of the games (or the actual client) has registered its intent to update, but it cannot, due to offline mode being enabled.

Try enabling online mode, and updating everything. This should negate the need for an update, and fix the problem.

However, if I have read your question wrong, this method will probably not work.

MacOS – Parental Controls Always Allow does not work

This gave me enough info to fix the Minecraft launcher. The prior answer works, but has an ugly menu name, which my son would pester me about. So instead, I fixed the Minecraft.app setup.

In a nutshell, in terminal:

cd /Applications/Minecraft/Contents/MacOS
mv JavaApplicationStub Minecraft
cat > JavaApplicationStub << EOF
#!/bin/sh

exec `dirname $0`/Minecraft "$@"
EOF
chmod +x ./JavaApplicationStub

Basically, it would appear that ParentalControls expects the application being run to match the name of the executable (which is not the case with the distributed app: It's Minecraft.app, and JavaApplicationStub), so by moving the executable to match the app name, it works. I had to create a shell script to actually exec the executable because I got "Path not found" otherwise.

This seemed to work.

I only put this here because it worked for me. If you do not understand the code block again, please keep in mind you might have to re-download the app (or make a copy first).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Steam under Parental Controls

MacOS – Parental Controls Always Allow does not work

Related Question