All tyres on all cars are black.

There is most certainly a good reason for this; but it doesn’t have to be.

Once  it was impossible to use anything but freon in refrigerators.  But it isn’t.

Once it was impossible to sell coffee filters that weren’t white.  But not today.

Once every telephone had to be tied down with a cord.  But not nowadays.

So why not make them blue?  or red?  or flowery and spotted?

Babysitting your own children and out of ideas of what to do that is both educational, fun and social?

Why not have a site that is geo sensitive and keeps discussions about local happenings.  Think opening hours of museums, position of play grounds, public transportations maps, happenings, eating possibilities.  It should be crowd sourced so the parents themselves use and update it.  Then big enough so the local businesses (museums, stores, kiosks) updates it to draw more customers.

This idea can be made universal to handle almost anything “what should I do today” but limiting it to parents and their children could be a good idea to make the subject narrow enough to be usable.

If you local surroundings aren’t interesting enough for such a site, think visitors and yourself travelling with children.

As a computer knowing fellow human being it is my ban and blessing to be the answerer for every computer related question.

Short:

Why not create a user interface that is so simple that even your mother can understand it?  And even you can talk her through over the phone?  Then introduce more functionality as the user’s knowledge and self confidence rises.

Long:

Create a user interface to a computer.  Let it run a simple web browser and a simple email client.  Let it have one and one only folder to store files.  Let it be easy to setup for remote control.  Maybe even maybe stop the user from changing things to start with.

Bare with me for a few more lines if the above solution is too rough.

Wire frame example

Let there be only one way to start things.  Skip double click.  Skip drag and drop.

Now let the user use this for a while and become comfortable with reading email, chatting, surf the web and print pictures for the camera.

Add more functionality.  Depending on the savviness of the user – introduce drag and drop or the context menu.  Introduce more programs or the possibility to format emails.  Allow more ways to do the same thing.

By the time of writing I see no way of doing a transparent change from Your mother’s operating system to Windows or MacOS or KDE but one should be able to introduce the ideas, allegories and words from a full grown OS GUI.