Comment by tanderson92

I had my first computer when I was 7. It was a 286 from way back in the day. I learned to navigate around a command prompt and deface some of the IBM software my dad brought home. If was fun to get into things, reconfigure things for games, and just solve problems that came up. None of this was super complicated. I mostly taught myself, but my dad spent the time to get me started and help to figure it out.

I didn't start programming until age 28, because my dad couldn't program and I didn't how to get started on my own. But, had he gotten me started on programming too I would have been programming from the command line as a preteen. I knew other preteens who were doing so.

That is why the comments here are so puzzling. Supposedly this a community of mostly software people. I take it most of these people commenting here lack the focus to figure any of this out themselves, much less teach a child to do it. There is even a comment in here from somebody not knowing what to teach a child and then being completely mystified about it once its pointed out.

My wife is a special education teacher. The common reality she sees (the normal parent) just plants a phone their kid's hands and ignores them all day. To most people that is a technology education, the hands off approach. I really get the feeling that is what most people are looking for something to throw at a child and then wash their hands of it, and the comments here further reinforce this assumption.

Didn't downvote you, I remember my first steps too.

But we weren't the overwhelmed gen alpha consumers. Average teen-and-under currently is far less technically inclined (including analytic skills) than a teen of the 90's or 90's had to be.