My wife is a teacher with 18 years experience at a premier private boys school, she also has a masters degree in IT and is the campus guru in information literacy, she says go for it. I agree with your Mother's opinion up to the pushy parents comment. Simply providing your 2 year old with a computer doesn't mean you're pushy parent, it just means that your providing another avenue of exploration, whether they understand what a complex device is or not is immaterial. I guess it's a matter of personal opinion and generation bias. If your mother grew up in an age where computers were as ubiquitous as toasters and even considered fashion items she may have a different opinion. The older generation (and even some genx) for the most part still think computing is an arcane art (obviously this doesn't apply to your Mother I'm generalising now :)) and are horrified at the idea of placing something they don't fully understand in the hands of their preschoolers. Subconciously people associate Computers=Internet=Porn and sound the alarm bells at exposing 2 year olds to the internet. What they fail to take into acccount is that you can actually unplug a computer from the net and just load up some preschool games.

It's about balance, having a pc in the corner doesn't mean that they'll be on it 24/7. My child has a laptop and he enjoys using it, it's freely available in the lounge room, however he spends 99% of his life running around like a maniac with his friends, playing with his trains, interacting with his parents/daycare/family and 1% on the laptop.

A coupleof years ago I noticed that my then 2 year old son kept on wanting to play those Nickalodean games on my pc, which was pretty annoying as I needed to use it for my own purposes warcraft so I rummaged around in the shed and found an old 15inch Dell laptop, I loaded linux onto it and hooked it up to the house network. The laptop sits next to the TV in the loungeroom and he can play his games to his hearts content, which is around 1hr per week lol. Early on he'd rip some of the keys from the keyboard and blame the cat, but he stopped that after a while.