Yes, I totally agree that for young children nurturing curiosity is far more important thsn mastering any particular skill. Only reading has the same impact on

Yes, I totally agree that for young children nurturing curiosity is far more important thsn mastering any particular skill. Only reading has the same impact on the development of children. But programming can be a lot of fun, too. When I introduced my son to programming, I started with something visual and has direct feedback like Scratch. Such environment frees children from the tyranny of the syntax so they can focus more on the problem at hand and have fun. Nevertheless, you can teach them a lot of computational thinking using such visual environment. And I think the key issue is computational thinking, not learning some particular languages or knowing how to solve a specific problem using some specific features. I would not buy coding books for my son when they present problem solving like a recipe book, even though one can get inspired from some of the problems in such books. In my experience, combining programming activity with other fields like maths, gaming or robotics can be very rewarding. Children will understand that programming is only a tool and not a purpose for itself and they will start looking for connection between different subjects. Once they start to reflect on their activities, they will learn a lot more than just doing it.