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Comment by kotojo | Hacker News Reader

Tangent: 4?! My son is 2 and a half and we have just gotten to the point where he will even pay attention to a tv for more than 10 minutes (and only for peppa pig of all things).

I'm really thought it was further away than that for any sort of gaming or real computer use, but I have no gauge from growing up in a house without anything but a tv till I was almost in middle school.

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When my kid was 2 ish I introduced them to TuxPaint. Turns the speakers on, pick a stamp of whatever their favorite is (dinosaurs? butterfly? fish?) Put your hand over their hand and select the stamp and then select where to put it. Once that gets boring show them pick color, pick stamp, place it. After that show them pick size, then color, then stam, and then place it.

Kept my kid busy, she loved being creative, and it's way better than watching some video.

After an hour she looked at me, looked at her hand, and said "ow". I got her a smaller mouse ;-).

I’ve taught a 3 year old his first letters with “bambam” and “gamine”. I don’t know that’s it’s as healthy as off-screen play though.

It depends on their role models. When I was a toddler I saw my older family members playing games and I wanted to do what they did. I learned how to load commodore games from the command line at age 5, maybe 4.

My kids had only a casual interest in games until age 6 when the older one discovered minecraft.

Wasn't that part of the intrigue when computers and games had cables and cartridges and you needed to crawl behind the TV to connect it when you wanted to play? The romanticism is lost. I wonder for me, getting involved back then was hardware related.

Thankfully Lego remains.

My 4 year old can unlock our phones, open the Roku app and put on a few different shows. She also has learned how to use Google transcription to send text messages to her cousins, although Google still hasn't figured out how to transcribe Armenian, so they are usually a little jumbled.

I had a few Super Nintendo games under my belt by age 4. I think the best thing you can do is surround your toddler with potential interests and hobbies and let them naturally gravitate toward what interests them.

As a counter point, why give them screens so young at all?

I am someone without children, so my point is much less valuable then the others already below. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/23/screen-ti...

https://www.businessinsider.com/screen-time-limits-bill-gate...

As someone without children you don't understand that parents need to rest after couple years of constant taking care of children :) I was the smartest about raising kids when I didn't have them yet :)

The only way to really keep your child away from screens is to keep them out of the house entirely. They are going to see your computer and your phone and want it. 4 year olds understand a lot about the world, so it's not like you can just pretend you don't have these awesome toys.

They grow up quick! And one of the super fun things about Roblox is most of the games are very simple and there are a practically infinite number of them. It doesn't take much more attention than your 2.5 year old has for a kid to drop into a game, walk around for a bit, get bored, and drop into something new.

As a 46 year old with what I suspect is undiagnosed ADHD, this is exactly what I tend to do with PICO-8

All kids are different, but our youngest (of four) started playing roblox at 2.5 — we have no idea how/why. Interactive stuff seems to keep them attentive longer, and most importantly: Engaged & thinking.

Now the house sounds like a perpetual LAN party.

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