Online safety is a top family priority and concern today. And although parents seem to get the message that monitoring Internet activity of their children is essential, few seem to put it into physical practice. Co-Founder of Pandora Corp., Manuel Coats, says there's a bad stigma associated with parents playing big brother.

Coats declared: "Unfortunately, parents have a fear of invading their child's privacy." He added: "I consider this to be irrational, and a poorly associated stigma. Parent job number one is to protect your child. How can you do that if you don't know what they are doing, where they are going or who they associate with?"

Many critics liken the use of monitoring software to reading a personal diary, or listening to a phone conversation, or even reading mail.

The fact that the incredible knowledge parents can obtain from monitoring software, like Pandora Corp's flagship title PC Pandora, is a power that can quickly and easily be misused by parents, is assumed by a lot of skeptics are quick. Some fear that innocent checking and monitoring will quickly turn to snooping and spying. But the fact that it's up to the parent to be able to walk that line of being a parent and being intrusive is quickly pointed out by Coats.

Coats recommends that all parents use monitoring software like PC Pandora 5.0, which works like a DVR for your computer. Providing parents with a detailed visual record of everything their children saw and did on and offline, the program takes sequential snapshots of what is on the computer screen. In addition, further details of user activity, such as keystrokes logged, instant messenger chats, emails sent and received, websites visited, peer-2-peer files traded, programs accessed and more, can be seen in text-based files. It will even email a busy parent at work with updates on activity.

Though the threat of Internet predators seems to be the most publicized and talked about, chances are it's not the threat your kids will encounter first.

Manuel Coats asks parents to consider the idea thoroughly before dismissing it, while some may feel monitoring computer activity of kids is "too much" and more like "spying".