Not sure if this is the right place to put this but...
DS1 is autistic and has ADHD. He gets passing intense interests but his one continuing passion is gaming, especially Minecraft. He doesn't play with toys. He used to love Lego, it is now done under duress. He has never played imaginatively with toys. We have a whole cupboard full of games which we do play together as a family, but we really don't need anymore of these. So I don't really know what to get him toy wise. We're buried in books (which he does read) and he already has a magazine subscription.
So, for his 8th birthday I'm thinking of getting him a laptop. Reasoning is that I can barely use the iPad because of parental controls and he is not getting his mitts on my laptop, but the laptop version of Minecraft is better apparently. Also, I think he'd love coding and I think it would be a useful skill for him to learn so we could buy him the laptop, put Minecraft on it and buy him some coding lessons. I've also been looking into therapy for ASD children via gaming for him and he could access this via the laptop. In addition, his occupational therapist has said that realistically he'll probably need to be typing rather than writing in secondary so to get him started on learning to touch type as it will take him longer - which he could do on the laptop.
But... it just feels weird getting him one so young. Even though we'd only allow him to use it in a room with us.
So, am I mad for considering this? And if not what should we get? With other family contributions we'd have a budget of £300-350 I think.