Comment by fullstop

I made sure to expose my kids to Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. They would use Linux for a bit, but ended up on Windows for games and Mac OS for media. Over the years, though, as Windows has gone EOL on their hardware or they have been forced into Windows 11, Linux has come back.

My oldest now has mint on her laptop and Bazzite/W11 dual booting her desktop. This was her own choice, and she did the setups herself.

My youngest is now almost an adult, but I went through the same thing that you are doing now about 15 years ago, before the prevalence of smartphones. You have a lot more options now, especially with cheap hardware which is well supported by Linux.

    * I picked up a tangerine iMac, and managed to install OS X on it.  I had to install on a G4 tower first and move the disk over. This machine was not online, and it let them play games like Alphabet Express, etc, without the slings / arrows of the Internet.
    * The educational thinkpad / lenovo laptops were built like tanks and supported Linux well. These were online, so I put them behind my own DNS resolver so that I could block some websites like Roblox, Discord, etc.
    * Scratch was well received, but you have to watch the online interactions.

When they are older, let them install Linux and give them full control and root access. Let them break it and try to fix it -- if it's too far broken they can just reinstall.

If they're not into tinkering, or not into tinkering yet, consider an immutable distribution like Kinoite, Aurora, or Bluefin. It is difficult for them to break things

Don't expect them to dive in and never leave the Linux ecosystem, an important lesson is "the right tool for the job". If they know that it is an option, they can always choose it.

I might be a bit odd in that I've been using Linux as my primary desktop since 1997, so the kids have seen it around for their entire lives.