There are many other factors for this, but the primary one is how much Google has invested in making that the case. Start them young.

And then later they learn the privacy repercussions. Plus earning money on 4 year olds? If its via advertising its shady. There's code of conduct here that commercials for under 12 aren't allowed (so they target the parents instead, yay).

I'll be teaching my kid to learn to go for the duck instead.

I chuckle every time I remember that when my dad used to interview secretaries to hire ~20 yrs ago, he'd always ask "Can you use computer?" which sounds like a quite funny question to ask a 20-something years old person nowadays, let alone kids.

By the way, I used to think that in the future, when people have had computers already from childhood, everyone would know their way around them really well and be advanced users who know programming and what not. That did not happen.

I would expect that the average computer/smart phone user in 2018 is much less computer-literate than the average computer user in 1998.

You don't have to know anything about computers to use them now. I would expect for most non-technical users, the computer consists of the web browser, and maybe Microsoft Office and a few games and that's it.

It's good that you don't have to know how a computer works to use it, but there are lots of downsides to that as well.