Well, kids learn much faster than adults. That is why they always say to get your kids started on languages and musical instruments when they are young. This side of the argument has me leaning towards letting your kid learn, or at least be exposed to multiple layouts.

I would not recommend you introduce him ONLY to Colemak though.

The thing is, there are a lot of other factors to consider as well. Such as, quisque maximus dolor nec touch typing orci tincidunt rutrum. Suspendisse potenti. Ut placerat venenatis sem, blank keycaps a rhoncus augue. Duis nec ortholinear keyboards lorem sed lorem feugiat rutrum id sed lectus. Quisque barrier to entry et tincidunt elit. Pellentesque stifling creativity vel erat sed orci posuere convallis vitae sed tellus. Quisque posuere nisi risus, tablet computers nec interdum est pellentesque consequat. Vestibulum social norms neque lacus, aliquet sed hendrerit peer pressure pulvinar, hendrerit et purus. Morbi interdum schoolyard gaming ut nunc vitae ullamcorper. Quisque ac onscreen keyboards lorem feugiat, dapibus nulla et, luctus purus. Cras gesture typing dapibus mollis nunc, id facilisis dolor tristique maximus. Aliquam consequat diam pretium, consequat eros voice typing et, pharetra tellus. Proin maximus vitae tellus ut maximus. You can lead a horse to water, etc.

... yeah. Raising kids is hard enough already. Stick to Qwerty. You've got time to share why YOU use Colemak as he grows up, and if HE chooses to learn it too, awesome. If not, then it is one less thing for him to resent you for when he's deciding what nursing home you go to. ;)

Either way, good luck!

There's no avoiding Qwerty unfortunately.

But I'd take the the analogy with languages. If a child grows up in a household where the parents speak more than one language, it's probably a good idea to expose the child to both languages, and have them grow up learning both simultaneously.

It's probably much easier to become 'bikeyboardial' too if you are only 6.

I gave my middle daughter a Colemak-setup laptop to learn on, and she adopted that just fine. Later on, she moved on to QWERTY and I don't think she remembers any Colemak any more. Hard to beat the world.

On a mostly unrelated side note: Whoever uses Braille stickers to learn touch typing first is almost guaranteed to win the forum Geek-Of-The-Month award! ^_^

I'm constantly amazed that keyboards still exist.

My partner has gone all 21st century by owning and using a mobile smart phone, and now bangs out emails and chats with what appears clumsy one fingering.  That said it's quick enough and will do.  Her keyboard typing is fast enough but requires some peeking and she does either as and when the need occurs.

I'm saying that because knowing and watching kids they seem to live and breathe by their phones.  Keyboarding today IS falling by the wayside.  So I doubt it matters one iota.

However, if you do think touch typing is a skill worth imbibing, not having legends on the keys I think can help you get out the habit of looking.  So learning a layout (from scratch) that is not Qwerty might in some ways be easier.  But perhaps going from being able to see the keyboard to pure touch has other benefits.  Who knows?

Fun keyboard games could be a way in, but something tells me kids will only learn the bare essentials to do what they need to do.

Thanks for the praise, Jesus! It's nice to know that people are helped by this community's and my own endeavors.

About the stagger issue, you must've read about the AngleWide and Curl-DH mods in my Big Bag topics? These address those issues. While less effective than a Kinesis (I believe), they work on standard-issue hardware. The Curl-DvbgHm mod is useable on a Kinesis too, and I think it's a good idea. One might argue that it's confusing to newcomers that there are two Curl mods in addition to vanilla Colemak, but I believe we need these to stop Workman/Norman in their tracks as they address issues those layouts address without leaving the brilliant stats of Colemak behind. And they're so nice, too (I use the DbgHk Curl mod on normal-stagger boards).

There's also Extend which I feel is every bit as good as Colemak itself. And even a recalcitrant QWERTY user could benefit from at least parts of it. It's low threshold, big benefit whereas Colemak is more high threshold, big benefit.

I think keyboards are here to stay for a while more, at least. It's nice to be able to use all your fingers to input text; that's efficient. I imagine something like a DataHand could be nice, or even the Wayfarer Textblade. But these are still 8–10 finger approaches.

Well, imagine an office where everybody mumbling something in microphones. Or using voice input for coding in today's mostly textual programming languages rich of special symbols. This approach has its limitation, while keyboarding is universal. I do not think it will disappear soon, at least not in our lives.

You people with your garden-variety English seem to think that everything's figured out with respect to voice recognition. It isn't. With all the pidgins and dialects and languages out there, adopting this tech full-scale would lead to a deepening of the rich-poor world schism. I don't want that.

Exhibit A:
https://youtu.be/NMS2VnDveP8

^_^

Of course, Watson and other learning machines are getting better every minute so for all I know language recognition may be easy some day soon and that'll of course change the equation radically. But until then, text is more friendly.

LabView and other mousing apps isn't going to be a problem though. You'll sit and point your finger at the screen while talking, I guess.

I like the Star Trek style computer interaction.  It's more master and servant, and as such you save your voice and energy (like the boss example above).

i karnt speek anywear near as well as i can right

Thank you for the link, very interesting.
It is working indeed. I've actually expected something like that system to be existing somewhere. As the guy told, out of box products are created for ms word and outlook, but not for programming.
Keywords are still: "requires training" and "suffering from RSI". People can play table tennis holding rocket in their mouth or dress themselves using their legs when they have no arms. But would it be better than using arms? The guy in the video would not come up to that system if he would not suffer from RSI.
The expensive $300 mic is also required to successfully use that VR. While with any $15 keyboard the same can be done as much effective.
Why we do texting on phone when we can just call instead? Because speaking is not always appropriate to the task. You may consider me a retrograde, but IMO such VRs will always be a niche solutions but not a mainstream. Good old qwerty will outlive all of us. :)

Each time/generation has its own science fiction appropriate to the epoch. In the 20th century that was space travels and colonizing of other planets. Many people was sure that will be a reality in the year 2017. Is it? But we have the Internet instead that nobody imagined about at that old time. Most of progress nowaday is in electronics and information technologies. And we trend to imagine even more progress in that area familiar for us. But it might be something else what we can not imagine today.