Yes, i’ve probably crossed some line of bad parenting, but yesterday I bought my 4 year old son his first iPod.

And you know what – he loves it. Here’s how he ended up with a new shuffle:

Last year for his birthday, we picked up a Fisher Price Kid Tough Camera. While the photo quality is pretty poor (it’s no Nikon ), it turned into a great gift – he was able to easily pick it up and take tons of photos. It’s also been a lot of fun and quite interesting to see what he’s been taking pictures of during the last year.

For this birthday, since Tyler loves music and has been fighting with his younger brother over control of the playroom CD player, we thought we’d try out the Fisher Price Kid Tough FP3 player. And wow, what a piece of crap. Not only did it not work with the Mac, the general construction of the device just seemed cheap.

Anyways – I had been hunting around to get a kid-friendly player, when Apple dropped the price of the shuffle to $49 yesterday. Since the device is basically a simple “push play, forward, backward” mechanism and is somewhat indestructible (compared to a nano or classic), I figured what the heck.

So, last night we loaded up 150 tracks of his favorite kid music on it (still has 750mb free) and he had a blast. The expression of pure happiness on hearing his music come out of such a tiny gadget was worth it.

The only problem, of course, was getting him to actually let go of the device and go to bed.