I know children that had their own PC at a very young age, and they a dumb as a door knob, all they know is how to turn it on or off and how to play GTA4. They are doing bad in school and they are doing bad in life in general. I know their parents, I know they had good intentions, but sometimes you don't have time to watch your children all the time, and all it takes is a moment and they are lost to the world.

But i know a few children who had pcs at a young age and are excelling in both educational and social skills. My neice is now 9, she can read at the same level as a 20 year old, yet she's had a pc from a young age. Your comments are as bad as certain MP's blaming violence on video games. i dont hear those MP's moan about things like paint balling which is alot closer to running into a school shooting away than counterstrike.

i think your getting close to parenting skills. Nothing to do with the PC. If you dont have time to watch your kids, you take the power lead from the PC etc.

I think Jim was wondering if the pc would make a good addition to her life, not a subsitution.

i had a pc at age 5, and now on my way to be a doctor, i played county level cricket,fell out trees, and spent far more time outside than 99% of kids these days and dont consider myself either a moron or pyschopath..

only thing that ever went wrong was rining up a £70 phone bill in one month playing close combat 2 online at age 13 or so on dial up

Yeah I had a PC all the way from when the first IBM's appeared as my Mum used them in school and she had one at home. I've got a Degree from UCL and am an IT Consultant, having also played semi-pro football and a variety of other sports at County Level. Same as above I was outside for most of my childhood, but spent time on the PC when I wanted to. Oh and I'm certainly not socially inept either, thank you very much :D

I have had my own pc in my room since I was 4, this was with no restrictions on time limits etc, although I did not have internet at the time (there was only dial up in South Africa). At the age of 7 I started playing C&C with my dad over the internet, we used the same profile and I played during the day and he played at night. I have been into internet gaming ever since. I have played CSS with some of the best, and Sihastru this has not "limited my growth in anyway." If anything I have got more friends from round the world then I do in Edinburgh. Sure I did spend a loads of time doing other things, my school made us do a sport everyday for 2 hours. However as much as I did/ do play games, I learnt how to fix PCs and with the internet, encarta and the likes used it as much as a educational tool as a "toy".

It really depends on the personalty of your daughter. My parents trusted me to use my computer unattended from a young age and it has stayed like that.

EDIT also Sihastru I am in no way as dumb as a door nail! I am busy doing Advanced Higher Maths, and Physics and going to do a MInf!

Quite, a computer can be pretty helpful, learning how to use a mouse and keybaord are important skills (especially today and in the future), in addition, I spent a good amount of time using ms paint to draw and do other kid type activities.
If Sihastru is right and I am as "dumb as a door nail", it makes me think that Oxford must have fallen a long way, rather than being the best uni in the country.

Hermit!

Yeah I had a PC all the way from when the first IBM's appeared as my Mum used them in school and she had one at home. I've got a Degree from UCL and am an IT Consultant, having also played semi-pro football and a variety of other sports at County Level. Same as above I was outside for most of my childhood, but spent time on the PC when I wanted to. Oh and I'm certainly not socially inept either, thank you very much :D

Whoa Sihastru I have to say that even though I'm not 100% sure on whether giving a PC to a 6yr old is correct (hence the thread), your views are quite extremist.

Well, I know, but I needed to be since everyone is agreeing to the idea that 6 is not too young. If 200 people start throwing rocks at you, you'd better have a tank... and a light saber :) .

I do have another small point to add, yes most of us had access to computers from a very young age, but consider the timeline a little bit. It was 10-20 or more years ago, we lived in a different world, with a different Internet (or no Internet), we had sinclairs, zx spectrums and amigas, monochrome screens with 8 bit graphics, we played Tetris and Mud. Blood and gore were expressed by a text line... "Your enemy is dead."

I agree it is a requirement to have the skills, but you don't exactly need them at the age of 6. The learning curve is steep, in about one or two years one can become quite the expert if the need arrives.

I mean, my job is as a computer programmer in an ERP specialized firm. Computers are my life. But there are days, where everything turns against me and I wish that I was somewhere else, doing something else. The point is, if you "push" her now in that direction she might regret it later... There are other jobs out there that don't require so much computer skills that you need 15 years in front of a screen to prepare for them, and in 10-20 years from now, the world will be different again.

I can see that your mind is settled, all you have to do is keep an eye on her and what she does with that PC, and maybe cut her a little slack and allow her to choose in the near future.

We don't know eachother at all, so it is very pretentious of me to continue giving advice. The parent always knows what's best for their own child. There is no right or wrong answer to your question. There is only potential for good things or for bad things to happen. It all depends your guidance.

also Sihastru I am in no way as dumb as a door nail! I am busy doing Advanced Higher Maths, and Physics and going to do a MInf!

You are not the exact person I used to exemplify the horror. My comment was in now way directed towards any of the people on this forum. I myself am a child of the microprocessor and I turned up allright. I'm no mad scientist, but I am doing ok. My social skills need constant improvement but I'm getting there...

I think you hit the nail on the head with the last paragraph, it all depends how she is going to be allowed to use it. If she's supervised then its fine.
TBH, I grew up with increasingly good graphics, for example, a game I got when I was about 8 or 9 was called Drakan, had some quite goretastic gibbing. Maybe this did affect me, I am most of the way to being a mad scientist, have enough social anxiety to keep drug companies in buisness for the rest of time. But I'm pretty sure none of this is actually due to the computer, and much more due to everything else.
Although, just for a laugh if someone does commit arson, can you blame it on all the spyro the dragan you played on the old playstation?

There's always the argument for content on the computer. Games particularly with clearly marked age limits on the purchased for those below those ages, the arguments either side of doing that I leave up to parents. They 'should' be the ones testing the content of these things, but we know these kinds of things rarely happen as pre 18s listen to alot of parental-guidance music - there is little or no guidance there. It makes me hard to crusade for my belief in zero censorship as I would boast along with that that kids don't work, they don't have a salary, they can't/shouldn't buy these things themselves. Then a parent get's these things for them and it blows the whole thing out.

As far as bad content, it's always existed, even so much as being in text form. A classic example was the 'game' Sweet Sexteen, the aim of the game was very in question, and to be fair u couldn't buy it, u would have to either download it on ur 400 baud or know some1 who had. But there were alot of others like it, just not in main circulation, as with alot of things at that time. There were muds, bbs, plenty of chat - but again it wasn't on a platform that was freely available to everyone. Jeez I can remember 4 way conference calls at 2am with people from all over the world due to some phreaker.

These things happen and always will happen, I mean there's a game that's banned from the US made in Japan that is similar to the game above, only we are ofc in the 21st century and the characters are modeled - very well modeled.

But I do feel that presenting a pc, or computer, to a child at any age, is there just as u would give them a glorified calculator and a pile of all the encyclopedia's without indexes.

From my own experience, I would keep ALL internet contact under supervision, non internet I would care less about - experience here of stuff like Office, painting packages even handling photos and printing are priceless. The majority of jobs in 10 years time will be computer based, I was gonna say something alot more advanced than we have now, but I wouldn't bet my house on it the way tech has ground to a halt.