Yeah bricking is mainly for people that do not follow instructions properly or update their Wii using discs, this can actually happen more to people using out of region discs on their consoles with modchips and the only way to block these are with softmodding.

Softmod is best if you can use a HDD to load to the games from. This would probably suit you best aswell as you can use parental control passwords on games and it also means your daughter will not have to handle dvds. Simply click to load the USB loader then select the game she wants to play, pretty easy really and you can pickup a nice WD passport for the price of a Wii game or a modchip. I have no idea about drive speed with burnt DVDs as this is not really a suitable option for softmodders as you can tell. What I will say is that load times are faster when loading from a HDD and some games (HOTD overkill comes to mind) actually play better than the original.

Your Wii seems fine to go ahead and softmod. Here are the first steps you should follow if you want to go ahead and do this:

Use bannerbomb to load the hackmii installer and install bootmii, DVDX and the homebrew channel:

1. http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Bannerbomb
2. http://bootmii.org/download/

Once you have done this, you should run a backup of your Wii system memory to make sure if anything goes wrong with setting it up for USB, you can always roll back and you are safe from bricks.

Once you have your backup you can go ahead and update the Wii to 4.1 and install cIOS rev14 and a USB Loader:

3. http://wii.ds-scene.net/?s=download&viewfile=3d1fd987cbfa69ee30f84e03d3c123b1
4. http://wii.ds-scene.net/?s=download&viewfile=a7ddd13075d0c56d392e75dcc3565ad4
5. http://code.google.com/p/usbloader-gui/downloads/list

Let me warn you that you should NEVER update your console using a Wii game or via an official Nintendo update. This could render your softmods and maybe even your modchip useless (if Nintendo decide to block modchips).

You will now need WBFS manager to format the HDD to WBFS and to install your backups to your Wii:

6. http://wbfsmanager.codeplex.com/

This is everything you need to get backups to load from HDD. Feel free to ask any questions if you feel the need to do so, which I am sure you will.