My three year old girl mashes the flippers, but not always, and usually only when the ball is kind of near or on the flipper. I try and get after her for it and she'll do a few nicely hit shots. I've also aside from the two I have also have a mini-pin that Tomy Astro Shooter, she just mashes the crap out of it so I stopped letting her play because she doesn't understand it's not powered so her going nuts puts no power into the shots so it just never scores. She's learning, and it's not like i play them every single day for a bunch of quarters so I don't see her wearing the stuff out considering they're meant for public beatings.

I think when he said if they're old enough to reach, he meant both buttons at the same time, not a height requirement. I have one of those ottoman fabric/wood cubes with the small pillow top to it that sits under my PinBot and when she wants to play I just slide it out. Perfect height, hands reach the sides quite nicely. She'll do a few games until frustration sets in and I just keep trying to coach her to hit the flipper when needed otherwise it tends to whack it back down into the center anyway with a crappy ricochet. She learns, I kept on her about starting four player games, and that came to a stop after a couple of weeks and hasn't happened since. I just kept switching it off and restarting it or just leaving it off, it made my point.

The most wear I notice isn't her fault, it's just the age of the game and how finicky the setup on it may be. The Gold Ball I have is a love hate situation as it's a speedy low scoring EM wannabe that loves to go down the center or right a lot. But, it is fun, a good coach on learning aiming shots, and it requires no maintenance. PinBot I love, but at times I get mad at it because it seems that flipping run up to and through the vortex is so pissy that you could fart in the tables general direction and it won't be happy enough to cleanly repeat the same shot to the top sometimes banging apparent thin air to a 5K shot or it'll run fast to the top, or creep there...total mystery. I have to tweak it ever so often which I don't like having to do, but I do it. Maybe if I were smarter at fixing/rigging these things I could bulletproof that better, but I have no idea.

I'd agree to a point with this if the kids refuse to listen. Mine needs to stand on a square ottoman I have, but she doesn't mash, doesn't rub all over the glass, even keeps her drink if she has one off the table completely. It was fairly quick to break her in to behave because if she lit up more than 1P at a time when I'd warn her, I'd flip it off and tell her go away and play with something else. She'd flip out and wail, then go do something else and learned quickly it was my way or the highway. Now she plays well for her age I think, tries her best at it, and doesn't flipper mash as she really does try and hit the thing at the right moment and the right one too.

Msch, remember you were conceived at some point too. >:]