It would be nice to have an option to allow a parent checkbox state to reflect downwards on any children under it (just like explorer does) ... That to me is the expected behavior .... Currently, I have to manually check each child under the parent, which can be tedious when there are a lot of entries.
What function are you trying to perform on the folder and its children?
If a folder is selected any operation you perform on it will automatically take place on all its children anyway. I can't think of any function that requires you to manually select the children underneath the folder.