In short, governments want to retain control and prepare for the future, and to retain control they need to control the flow of information and they need to have a monopoly on information. To achieve this they need an intelligence strategy that puts common people at the center (spying on them) and put restrictions in place. But they can't say this outloud because in the current era it's problematic, so the children become a good excuse.
This is particularly clear in governments that don't care about political correctness or are not competent enough to disguise their intentions. Such an example is the Argentine government, which these years passed laws to survey online activity and to put it's intelligence agency to spy on "anyone that puts sovereign narrative and cohesion at risk".