In terms of finger travel, if I've already moved my right hand to the arrow keys, and my left hand to ctrl and shift, then it's simply hold-ctrl, left, start holding shift, right. While not quite as simple as ciw, my main complaint is moving my right hand all the way over to the arrows and back; complaining about the comparative complexity of the sequence seems ridiculous.
What annoys me about the arrow keys is that I can't reach them without looking, and they also change position on different keyboards (standard keyboards vs laptop keyboards, for example). Having to look to the keyboard distracts me.
Agreed - needing arrow keys in the middle of doing anything else is bad. My point was that, in this particular case, the fact that the arrow keys are needed is basically all of the bad, and that the parent's complaint of increased complexity/typing is certainly not strong and perhaps not valid.
