Make your Mac Kid Friendly

If you have young kids there’s a couple things you can do to make your Mac even more friendly and easy to use for them. The focus should be on simplifying the user experience by reducing anything that’s confusing or distracting. Here are my favorite tricks for making the Mac experience extra friendly for young children:

Tips for Making a Mac Kid Friendly

• Create a New User Account for the child, make sure it is not an Administrator, then login to that user account
• Disable things like Spaces and Expose
• Shrink/Hide the Dock
• Disable ‘Recent Items’
• Increase the icon size and font text size of Finder items
• Choose a simple Desktop Picture
• Install kid-friendly and fun applications for the child to use
• Setup Parental Controls through the System Preferences > Parental Controls panel to do things like: determine what applications they can use, set time limits on computer usage, set bed-times, create logs for websites visited, limit email and iChat conversations to only allowed users, limit access to certain websites, and more.

Another great solution… let them use an iPad! Kids love an iPad or even an iPhone but the iPad in particular is great with little kids. There isn’t much room to mess about and you can put them into a good app or game and they will be entertained for hours on end. I find the iPad to be a great kid-friendly device and it’s really just a highly simplified Mac in terms of appearance so it works quite well for them.