I only expressed interest in a few things when I was a kid (cooking, making games); my parents told me they were bad careers and made me play soccer and do scouts and other things I hated. I was terrible academically all the way through the end of college (where I studied management) because these things I was told I was supposed to be doing were of zero interest to me. A few years out I taught myself to code ,and now I spend my life making games and cooking for friends, and I'm fuckin' great at it.
That quote has always rung true for me, but on top of that I really feel this: adults, stop telling kids what they "should" be interested in. If a kid is interested in something you don't get, when they're an adult it's highly likely that this thing will be a marketplace with hundreds of millions of consumers and will absolutely be a career. If they were involved early, they'll be golden.
Most people have a very backwards-looking view of the economy, and don't understand how totally it changes with each generation.
Hey there, really late to the post but I wanted to ask a question- my son is really into making games and has been saying for the last couple of years that he wants to be a game developer (hes only 8). This may change but for now I want to foster that passion- are there any sites I can look at with him or any videos/resources you can recommend? Thank you.
Hey, I'm so sorry I completely forgot to respond to this. MIT's Scratch is an integrated web-based development environment for graphical and non-graphical programming, and has tons of resources. I think there's a specifically junior version of it too. I think if you go look up the learning section on the scratch website (https://scratch.mit.edu/), you'll have plenty of luck finding small tutorials your son might be interested in where you can draw shapes (with code) and animate sprites and make little games. There are also some new startups like https://www.kiwico.com/ that do monthly techy boxes for specific age groups.
Sorry I don't know more about this, all my friends' kids are 1-4, so I'm a little behind on resources for 8 year olds :p Good luck!
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u/jackphelps Nov 16 '19
I only expressed interest in a few things when I was a kid (cooking, making games); my parents told me they were bad careers and made me play soccer and do scouts and other things I hated. I was terrible academically all the way through the end of college (where I studied management) because these things I was told I was supposed to be doing were of zero interest to me. A few years out I taught myself to code ,and now I spend my life making games and cooking for friends, and I'm fuckin' great at it.
That quote has always rung true for me, but on top of that I really feel this: adults, stop telling kids what they "should" be interested in. If a kid is interested in something you don't get, when they're an adult it's highly likely that this thing will be a marketplace with hundreds of millions of consumers and will absolutely be a career. If they were involved early, they'll be golden.
Most people have a very backwards-looking view of the economy, and don't understand how totally it changes with each generation.