Microsoft has designed Windows 8 to make parental monitoring and control of children's computer activities more effective, by offering improved family safety features and services. With Windows 8, parents can monitor what their kids are doing, no matter where they use their PC. Parents can create a Windows user account for each child, turn on Family Safety, and then review weekly reports that describe their children?s PC use.

Windows 8 provides informative activity reports for each child. As soon as parents enable the Family Safety feature, they'll receive a welcome email followed by weekly email reports summarizing their child's computer activities.

Any changes parents make to Family Safety settings are stored in the cloud at familysafety.microsoft.com. These changes are then automatically applied to all Windows PCs where Family Safety is active.

For parents who need more control, they can set up more powerful and customizable restrictions directly from links in the activity reporting email, or on familysafety.microsoft.com, if needed. These additional restrictions include web filtering; SafeSearch (SafeSearch will filter out adult text, images, and videos from search results of Bing, Google, and Yahoo); Time limits (parents can restrict the number of hours per day their child can use their PC); restrictions in Windows Store that prevent children from seeing apps in the Windows Store above a particular age. Parent scan also block specific applications and games.

Windows 8 is currently in "Consumer Preview" beta. People interested in these Family Safety features should watch out for the next Windows 8 release, termed "Release Preview," which Microsoft has said is expected at some point in June.

Microsoft hasn't said exactly when it plans to ship Windows 8 in commercial final form.