I Raised My Kids On the Command Line and They Love It (2012)

This kind of article makes me gag - the online equivalent of those "proud parent of a ..." bumper sticker.

if nothing else, this shows how fantastically malleable children are. this is why we need parents, not advertisers, telling them what they should like, do, and explore.

adorable, and good for you! Seems kids now, spend all their time on computers, and don't even know how to use them. My parents supported my interest in computers from a young age and it's paid off for me a thousand times over, but that was when I had to learn about jumpers and IRQ's to install a new peripheral. I fear that if they had offered the same "support" these days, I would just be really good at facebook and videogames.

I disagree. I think you're taking a narrow-scope on this story. The lesson here is that you can teach kids about any facet of the computing landscape, and they can catch on quickly and learn a valuable skill.

Just because you're not getting into low-level hardware interrupts or vector tables or memory addresses, does not mean you "don't know how to use" a computer. I'm glad you have that knowledge, I enjoy stuff like that too.

But a lot of kids are "really good at facebook" and use that as inspiration to get into web dev. They want to create the next social network, or the next cool website. Maybe it sparks their interest in big data, or databases, or the math behind social networks.

This is just one example. I don't particularly care about or use facebook personally. But there are a million different facets to computing.

Maybe they end up as a graphic designer for a video game.

Maybe they learn they enjoy the machines themselves and build one some day.

Maybe they learn they don't quite care about computers, and just learn to become literate in an essential tool of the Information Economy. That's good too. shrugs

Yes, children love to play with their parents, at least till adolescence until it is not anymore cool for them.