My husband’s friend borrowed an old iPhone 3G, and returned it with restrictions enabled! Now, we cannot remember the password and there are eight failed attempts. The iPhone itself is not locked, just has restrictions enabled.

In the extreme case where you cannot remember your restrictions password, you can still recover it if you have a recent backup in iTunes. Note that this will only work if you back up to your local machine, and not to iCloud. Your device must also be running iOS 5 or earlier—this hack doesn’t work with iOS 6. 

First, download the free iPhone Backup Extractor application for your Mac, and then launch it and select Read Backups. In the pop-up dialog, select the device that you want to recover the password for, and then select iOS files in the Application Name, finally clicking the Extract button and saving the files to any easy-to-find location. 

iPhone Backup Extractor will retrieve iOS files from the backups stored in iTunes.

Next, locate the file com.apple.springboard.plist in the iOS Files/Library/Preferences folder. In this file (which can open from Quick Look in the Finder), you will see a key named SBParentalControlsPin that will contain the passcode as the value. If the PLIST file doesn’t display in Quick Look, you can open it in the TextEdit application.

With iOS 5 and earlier devices, the pin lock was easily readable from this file. But iOS 6 doesn’t store the passcode in the same way.