Toddler-Proof Your Mac: Three Ways to Lock the Keyboard and Trackpad While the Screen Stays On

A two-year-old can do more damage to a Mac in forty seconds than a bad update does in a year: a cartoon paused, a browser tab closed, a Slack message sent to the whole company consisting of the letter "j" 400 times, a terminal window with your agent in it quit with a single accidental ⌘Q. The usual advice is "just lock the screen", which is fine if the point was to stop the child using the Mac. It is useless if the point was to let the child watch something on it, or to leave your own work visibly running while they sit next to it.

This post covers the three ways to make a Mac kid-safe without turning the display off, what each one does and does not stop, and the honest gaps, because a small child is a surprisingly thorough penetration tester.

What "toddler-proof" actually has to stop

Write down what a child at the keyboard does, in order of likelihood, and the requirements become clear.

• Mashes keys. Letters go into whatever has focus. Space pauses the video. Escape leaves full screen. Random modifier combinations open Spotlight, Mission Control, Force Quit.
• Slaps the trackpad. Clicks land on whatever is under the cursor: the close button of the video, a link, a Dock icon. Multi-finger taps and swipes switch Spaces or show the desktop.
• Finds the keys that do something physical. Volume, brightness, the Touch ID button, and eventually the power button and the lid.
• Keeps going. A child does not stop at the first thing that doesn't work. Whatever you use has to keep holding after the first ten attempts.

So the requirement is: swallow all keyboard and pointer input, hide or protect everything that is not the thing they are allowed to watch, keep the display awake, and keep doing it when poked. Here are the three tools that get close.

Option 1: Guided Access on an iPad instead

Apple's own answer to this problem is Guided Access, and it is excellent, but it lives on iPhone and iPad, not on the Mac. If the only goal is "child watches a video and cannot leave it", hand them an iPad in Guided Access and the Mac stays out of it. We wrote about why there is no Mac equivalent, and the four ways people approximate one, in Guided Access for Mac. The rest of this post is for when the Mac is the screen you have, or when what is on the screen is yours.

Option 2: Full-screen video plus hope

The zero-cost approach: put the video full screen, hide the Dock, and sit close. It works until it doesn't. Space pauses, Escape exits, a two-finger swipe shows your email, and ⌘Q on the browser ends the film and opens negotiations. Some keyboard-blocking utilities built for cleaning will swallow keys for a fixed period, which helps, but most of them leave the trackpad live and do nothing about the other apps on screen; the keyboard cleaning mode comparison goes through those tools in detail.

Option 3: A watch-only lock (what VibeLock does)

VibeLock was built for a different scenario, leaving an AI coding agent visibly running while you step away, but the mechanism is exactly the kid-proof mechanism. When you lock from the menu bar:

• Every key press, click, drag and scroll is swallowed by a session-wide event tap that sees input before any app does. That includes modifiers on their own and system shortcuts: ⌘Tab, ⌘H, ⌘W, Mission Control and Spaces shortcuts. Spotlight (⌘Space), Force Quit (⌘⌥Esc) and ⌘Q are blocked outright, even in the unlock shield, so no key combination quits the thing they are watching or the thing you are running.
• Everything except your allow-list is hidden behind an opaque backdrop, and kept hidden: a sweep runs every two seconds and any blocked app that launches or unhides is hidden again at once. Desktop files are covered too.
• The display stays awake for as long as the lock is on, which is the difference between this and the macOS lock screen.
• The first touch raises an unlock shield, a near-opaque window asking for Touch ID or your Mac login password. A child pressing keys just sees the shield; nothing underneath reacts. Five wrong passwords lock the field for 30 seconds.

For a child-watching setup, the allow-list is the video app or browser window and nothing else; for a "my agent is running and my kid is on my lap" setup, it is your terminal. Terminal, iTerm2, Warp, Ghostty, Claude, ChatGPT/Codex and VS Code are pre-allowed and you can toggle any app from the menu bar. Leave the "Accessible While Locked" list empty, which it is by default; an accessible app lets input through to it, which is the opposite of what you want here.

Setting it up in two minutes

1. Install VibeLock (a native, signed and notarized Swift menu bar app, macOS 13 Ventura or later, $10 once). On first lock macOS asks for the Accessibility permission; that is the only permission it needs, and it is required for any app that blocks input.
2. Start the video, or the thing you want to keep running, and put it where you want it on screen. Full screen is fine: VibeLock leaves allowed full-screen windows exactly where they are.
3. In the menu bar, make sure that app is on the Visible While Locked list and nothing is on the Accessible list. Lock.
4. Hand over the Mac, or the lap. When you come back, press any key, touch the Touch ID sensor, and everything that was hidden comes back as you left it.

The honest gaps, kid edition

VibeLock's security model page lists what any input-blocking app on macOS cannot do. Read through a toddler's eyes, these are the ones that matter.

• Volume, brightness and media keys will probably still work. They arrive as system-defined events the tap does not subscribe to. Expect the sound to go to maximum at some point. The Touch Bar Control Strip, on Macs that have one, is the same.
• Three- and four-finger swipes still switch Spaces. An event tap cannot block trackpad gestures. VibeLock's mitigation is that if a swipe lands on a Space showing a blocked app, an opaque shield covers it, and swiping back drops the shield. The video does not get interacted with, but it may briefly disappear from view, which, with a small child, produces a complaint.
• The power button and the lid are physical. A short press on the power or Touch ID button can sleep or lock the Mac; a long press forces a shutdown. Closing the lid sleeps it. All of these end at the real macOS login screen, so nothing is exposed, but the film is over and so is your agent run.
• Notification banners still appear. They are drawn by macOS, not the hidden apps. Turn on a Focus mode if a preview of a work message would be a problem on a shared screen.
• The screen is readable by design. Whatever you allow is visible to anyone, which is the point, and also the reason not to allow a terminal with secrets in it while someone else is watching the screen.
• Siri and Voice Control are not keyboard input. A loud child can open things by voice on a Mac with voice activation on; a blocked app that opens is hidden again, but it is a moment of flicker.

If the child is old enough to find the power button and determined enough to hold it, no software lock on any platform helps; that is what the real login screen and FileVault are for, and it is a good moment to end screen time anyway.

Which one to use

• Only the child needs a screen: iPad plus Guided Access. Nothing on a Mac is as locked down for this job.
• The Mac is the only screen and the content is a video: a watch-only lock, allow-list the player, lock, keep an eye on the volume keys.
• Your own work must keep running in view (an agent finishing a task, a long build, a presentation looping) while a child, a visitor or a colleague is around: that is precisely the case VibeLock was designed for, and the leaving Claude Code running post covers the agent side of it.
• You are leaving the room for a long time: use the real lock screen (⌃⌘Q). A watch-only lock is for the times you want to keep watching, not a substitute for the login screen when nobody is.