Fixing Mountain Lion Runaway parentalcontrolsd

Posted on 22 February 2013 by James Reuben Knowles

We upgraded a machine to Mountain Lion (10.8.2), but found that parentalcontrolsd was running constantly with high CPU usage. The steps to correct the problem were found on the Apple Support Forums.

  1. Disable parental controls on all users.
  2. Delete the folder /Library/Application Support/Apple/ParentalControls
    Please note that this command is a little dangerous. 
    $ sudo rm -rf "/Library/Application Support/Apple/ParentalControls"
  3. Restart Mac.
  4. Enable parental controls again.
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3 Responses to Fixing Mountain Lion Runaway parentalcontrolsd

  1. Chris says:
    2 March 2013 at 7:30 pm

    Thank you for this post! Saved me a great deal of grief!

  2. Jimmy says:
    30 March 2013 at 1:45 pm

    Same here. My iMac 27″ late 2009 model became so slow after the upgrade. This post saved me. Thank you so much!

  3. Oisin says:
    17 April 2013 at 7:18 am

    There is no parentalcontrols file in /Library/Application Support/Apple/ParentalControls there is only the Airport folder

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