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Seven is young. Many children can't even read, let alone navigate a command-line interface and dabble at programming at seven. Give it time. The whole cult a

Seven is young. Many children can't even read, let alone navigate a command-line interface and dabble at programming at seven. Give it time. The whole cult among parents these days about limiting screen time is worrisome to me. The only way I ever got into programming seriously was through gaming, and eventually, modding. An hour a week would never have given me enough time to get into that, however.

khedoros1 9y ago
My screen time was somewhat limited as a child, but to probably an hour or two a day (that is, by the time I was 9 or 10 and knew how to navigate DOS on my own). Games made me learn how to configure the computer. My first programming book was a book of late-70s BASIC games for microcomputers (which I used on my early 90s DOS machine). I only ever did some light modding, but when I had a chance to take some programming classes in high school, you'd better believe that games were on my radar. Writing emulators is still a hobby of mine. My parents monitored what I did, like I do with my kid now, and there are the "mysterious" times when the TV stops working (couple hours? OK. All day? No.) So I suppose that my wife and I are taking a kind of hybrid approach: Give kiddo the chance to be familiar with the technology around us, but regulate the time so that an obsession in the wrong direction never develops.