Need help to begin to play keyboard.

I started fairly late too. It's one of the best things I've ever done - it's so easy and enjoyable, and such a fun way to mess about in my spare time. It's totally replaced videogames in my life.

If you want a quick pre-lesson, put your left hand on you computer's keyboard, and rest them on the A D and G keys, leaving S and F untouched. This is your basic piano chord shape, and you can move it left and right along the keys of a piano keyboard to give you the C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, and Bdim chords. These are all the basic chords of the C Major scale, so with only that hand shape and left and right movements of your hand, you can play the chords for pretty much every song that's in C Major.

Chords aren't much without a melody, so take your right hand, and lay your fingers and thumb along your LKJHG keys. This is the same physical action as laying your fingers on all the white keys of a piano keyboard. The white keys are great, because they represent the C, D, E, F, G, A, and B notes, which corrospond to the C Major scale. This means that every white key note fits within the context of any of your three-finger C Major scale chords, so you can't really go wrong with them. When you get your keyboard, I'd encourage you just play around with those left-hand chords and right-hand notes. You'll find songs and melodies you know just by noodling, and it all only builds from there.

As to gear, I'm not really fit to advise on that point. But, fwiw, my favourite setup is actually built around my PC, where I use an Arturia Keylab 61 as my MIDI controller. This device doesn't create any sound by itself (MIDI controllers just send raw note data to a host, and it's the host which renders that note data as sound), but it does come with Arturia's Analog Lab V, which runs on Windows (and probably Mac), and which generates a whole load of different sounds, including a lineup of pianos. My headphones and speakers are plugged in to my PC via a Focusrite Scarlett Solo audio interface. I only have one extra thing, which is a sustain pedal (which I consider an absolute essential for piano/keyboards - absolutely love the sound of sustained notes). Total cost for this lot was about £300 + £80 + £15, but you can probably get a much cheaper setup.

If I was going for a starter option, I'd look for maybe a digital piano rather than a keyboard (kinda hoping for quality of sound, not quantity), and pick something which features velocity-sensitive keys (an absolute essential, which is often missing from budget keyboards), and support for a sustain pedal. If you want a quick and dirty recommendation, Yamaha's NP32 looks like a good starting point - it ticks all the boxes, is a reasonable price (£233 at Gear4Music), and appears to sound really nice. It comes with a 3mo free trial of their online training course too, which ought to be helpful to you.

Good luck with it, dude.

Go for 5 octaves. Full size not mini keys.
Casio and Yamaha are decent.
Yousician is pretty good to teach you the basics, but there's oodles of tutorials on YouTube too

It’s been a long time since I learned keyboard but dreary, repetitive theory based lessons never really helped me. I found that the best learning (for me) was to find some songs I liked and then learn the basic chords and start to play along. That way you start to get an instinctive handle of the sort of chord changes you’ll encounter in modern pop music. You’ll build some muscle memory and you get immediate gratification because what you’re playing sounds like what the band is playing.

This website has some good examples to show my point: merriammusic.com/sch…no/

If you don’t enjoy that then you probably won’t enjoy it when the challenge rises.

Also goal based learning is important. Pick a song or an album that you love (let’s assume you’re not aiming for Rachmaninov’s PC #2 in C minor) and set it as your target for playing uninterrupted, without mistakes or sheet music.

Ultimately as long as you’re enjoying it and playing regularly enough you’ll progress and your children will catch the bug too. Good luck it’s a great thing to try and learn!

When you say learn music, do you mean read music or play music? I can read music, but I'm absolutely hopeless at playing it. That was the old fashioned way to learn. I think with a keyboard, it helps to be able to read music. My son can't read music, but gets a lot of joy playing the guitar because you can play a lot of tunes by learning a few basic chords.