As a (very) young person, I hope that all of you who have the opportunity to (and feel it is appropriate) to instill programming into your children at a young age do so. The beauty of adopting a craft paradigm like programming lies in how it fails - All problems in programming are ultimately problems in dealing with our own intuitions about the mechanics of the world and our rationality, and the problematic interplay between those two agencies.
The very semantics of how we describe language advantages and disadvantages reflect this.
"Everything you manipulate is an object, and the results of those manipulations are themselves objects. However, many languages make the same claim, and their users often have a different interpretation of what object-oriented means and a different terminology for the concepts they employ."
Was that Jacques Lacan? Actually that's the pitch of the hit OOP dynamic language Ruby.
I think this is endlessly valuable to young people -- as so many programmers can attest, the key to solving errors seems to be in radical reassessments of your frame and mode of thinking: the nature of the solution to problems in programming isn't about abandoning rationality, as much as it is expanding the nature of rationality into solution sets such that the problem can be solved adequately. I don't think it's at all unscientific to say that when theres billions of hidden local variables at play in a machine, in some way, you have to put yourself at the mercy of a higher power (whatever that designation may imply).
Despite this, you still are the one in control. This is why I think software has something very important to offer kids for this dawning century. As a culture we're losing the real virtues of thinking passionately, of having a sense of responsibility for who you are, making something of your work and feeling good about your work and life in general.
Software, hacking, or whatever you'd like to call it gives you the undeniable feeling that your life is yours to create. Although it's a art mired in abstractions, it's incredibly concrete -- It's you reading this right now, making decisions, it lets you know that although it's true that theres about 7 billion people in the world, WHAT YOU DO MATTERS, not abstractly, but in material terms. A recurring message I see here in this thread is that software allows us to stop writing ourselves off and to stop seeing ourselves as the victim of a confluence of forces, despite us ultimately having no control of the machine beyond our own thoughts, no matter how aged, wizened or jaded with the craft we become.