If I'm honest, my son – and even his sister, who's one and a half – have an ease around technology that I find scary sometimes. The baby scares me because she keeps deleting stuff off my iPad. Patrick scares me because he could use the Nintendo Wii controls, shift from game to game, choose players, set up teams by the time he was four. He still can't tie his shoelaces. There is research that says he is not alone: a survey of 2,200 mothers in 11 countries found that 70% of their two- to five-year-olds were comfortable playing computer games, but only 11% could pass the shoelace test.

Miranda Sawyer, writing for The Observer, takes a look at children's natural affinity towards technology and innate understanding of interfaces particularly complex ones found in video games. ​

I recently saw a very young child, she must've been about 4, get her mom's iPad, push the home button, enter the lock pin code, find the video app by scrolling through several screens, find the video she wanted to watch and then scrub the video to the right location she wanted to see again. The whole thing was perfectly natural to her. I was floored that she understood how to slow down and speed up her scrubbing by how she dragged on the timeline.