Millions of parents in the USA alone monitor kids' PC activity and online behavior. No wonder - kids' online safety is a huge concern to parents nowadays.
Now lots of high-tech products for surveillance - mini cams, nanny cams GPS tracking systems, computer monitoring spy software for home and school PCs - are available; almost everybody can afford them. A couple of decades ago all these gadgets seemed to be from James Bond's arsenal. Monitoring software was simply unheard of. Now they are available to all and not very expensive.
There are plenty of threats that children can face in cyberspace. Predators lure kids away from home to rape and kill. Suspicious "friends" my kid meets online - who knows who they are and what they might teach my son or daughter? What is he or she chatting about - and with whom? All this never leaves minds of overworked, ever-busy parents. They resort to computer monitoring spy software to be sure their kids use home PC for proper purposes only while parents are at work.
As for software for parental control, it is a pretty useful tool - if applied right. Using software that can record all keystrokes typed may be handy though it isn't a panacea from dangers kids might face online. Parents shouldn't rely on it too much: no software could supplant parents caring for their kid - both online and offline.