I have actually read this before where there are people who actually buy kids company stocks for their gifts as a way to not only give them money but to teach them about investing. Reading this story of the recent Gamestop and Wall Street debacle kind of showed how that can be a very good thing. As the story goes there was a child that got about six Gamestop shares back in 2019 from her mom as a gift.
Apparently the mom does trading a lot as well and so she is trying to pass on that knowledge to her son. With the recent trading activity with the company she was floored to learn that the value of the stock went from a single digit value to triple. She then informed her son about this where after some talking he decided to sell and got about $3200 for his shares. Not a bad return on investment huh?
I suppose it does help like in this case where you buy stock in a company and industry that the child can actually relate with. Imagine getting a child stock in some pharmaceutical company as an example. But I know even as a child if my parents bought me one share of stocks in say Nintendo I would have found that really cool and may have even paid attention to see if it increased in value like savings account.