Kids Gaming or My Son's Landmark first character creation

I remember when I was back in the States, that there was a campaign for kids fishing and it had a slogan of "it's catching on". Apparently, family members would encourage ehir youngsters to learn fishing and it seems to have had some impact voer the years. Now I'm just guessing since I don't have any hard data (and frankly don't care enough to look it up - even though I applaud the campaign for getting kids fishing) but from what I can tell by the number of kids that I saw fishing in the sate of Missouri, it is indeed working. I'm interested in encouraging kids to roleplay (note I said encourage, not manipulate, coerce or force) as I think that it does have some good side benefits. My kids know I'm a gamer and are highly interested in what I'm doing. Today, I reached a landmark in every gamer's life. We created my son's first character.

I took the morning off to care for my son who was home from school with a sore throat while my wife was teaching a class. My son has shown great interest in RPGs even though he is only six and just learning to read. To make things a bit complicated, he is an American attending an Italian school so he learning to read in Italian. While the alphabet is for the most part the same, the pronunciation of the letters is a bit different. After we finished his homework, I was working on my character for the Zalchis campaign over at the Netherworks blog. He asked what I was doing and if he could play a game. We’ve played Dungeon! Several times and he loves the fantasy tropes. I also have every edition of D&D from the 0e white box all the way through 4e and Pathfinder. It’s interesting that he is most taken with the 1e AD&D/BECMI/Homes/Moldvay stuff over any of the newer stuff. At any rate, I asked what kind of character he wanted to play. We’ve been reading The Hobbit so he indicated that he wanted to play a hobbit. We rolled up a 1st level hobbit named Lightning Bolt (pretty cool to a six year old I guess). Unfortunately, we only had time to create a character and nothing more. The good thing is that it gives me a little time to craft up a small intro adventure. I have thought about doing Keep on the Borderlands but there are some subtleties there that I think a six year old boy would not pick up on. He is more interested in trying to pick pockets, sneak past trolls, and find treasure. I must say that I’m really excited to have a budding gamer in my midst. I’ll post updates on our progress. I’m working on some maps for a small cavern complex/dungeon and I’ll post those too for anyone curious. Only time will tell how Lightning Bolt will fare. However, I'm sure we are on the road to creating some golden gaming memories!