There was a doing something about the slightly ill, or healthy at the edge of the overton window, taking away from the extreme cases getting treatment or attention angle. The sceptic might say there is no clear useful additional treatment or attention!
Extreme autism may different. Treated more by Labour rather than chemicals.
I was in the British system (3 subjects, interview, effectively CV/Resume for top University, but mostly school exams, I academically stuck rigidly to the syllabus plus minor extracurricular).
My 17 year old son is in the Irish system. Top 6 subjects count for points, nothing else. Plus some minor need to pass requirements on other subjects. i.e. you cannot just specialise in science and maths at the end. (His 6th best subject will be Irish, English or French, all hard to get very top marks in.)
With dumbing down/grade inflation the skill to get ahead into a good degree is be pretty good at everything. Rather than absolutely brilliant at a couple of things.
He did a tiny bit of computers and maths extra classes, but we could not keep the maths classes going when it went back to in person after COVID, as we are on the poorer side of Dublin. Small chance he goes to Britain for undergraduate, which will be weird as he would suddenly have interviews/CV/Resume, whereas no interview/CV/Resume in Ireland.
I am looking for a bottle of computer science motivation for my 16 year old. I do an hour a week coding with him. It is not enough, he does no coding in between times. There are other things he prioritises ahead of coding. (School, music, YouTube videos, and chess.)
Pushing him to do something weekly that he doesn't sound interested in at the moment will only push him away from it in the longer term. Maybe try programming something that overlaps with his other interests that deepens his understanding of both subjects.
Then stop focusing on trying to get him to code, and focus on his music, his chess, his YouTube videos (especially if he has aspiration to be a content creator rather than a passive consumer), and his academics. Maybe related to one of those things, you could gently try to build a bridge between them and coding. However, don't force it. If you force it, you're essentially going to be raising someone who hates programming because "it's that shit my mom/dad forced me to do when I had no interest in doing it, I really wanted to be developing my chess game instead".
This is good advice if you live in a Hollywood movie fantasy, or are insanely rich. Otherwise this is bad advice.
A parents job is to steer their kids not into superficial happiness found through whatever interested them at 16, but to actual long term happiness achieved through fulfillment, accomplishment, stability, and belonging.
If I ignored CS pushed by my father to focus on whatever interested me at 16 (pot, girls, metal music, wow), I’m not sure where id be, but I imagine it would be worse off.
I believe you interpreted their comment as a sort of let them drown in hedonism moment, but from what I'm getting it's really just encouraging giving your kid space to find the joy themselves. You can encourage new forms or methods to see if it'll stick but you still have to let them be their own person. Forcing anything will just make your kid resent that entirely, and for a lot of parents they don't even realize this resentment of [subject/task/etc] also turned into a resentment of the parent.
Also I think you're too pessimistic about your past potential. You could have made a great musician, esports pro, hell there are even some successful marijuana companies now! I don't say this to stoke the flames of what ifs, but instead to highlight that it wasn't exactly your father's push for CS that is the only reason for your success. You should absolutely take some responsibility for committing and be proud of that, of course you can definitely attribute your understanding of why commitment is important to your father if that holds true!
Now that's good advice, teach your kids the importance of integral foundations like commitment, don't obsess over which specific field it is.
It's neither good nor bad advice. It will depend on the kid. Some will respond like you, while some will respond like the commenter above you explains.
I was treating the OP's list as a list of things their son was interested in doing or creating, not just idle timewasting. That's why I mentioned "especially if they have aspirations to be a content creator" in relation to YouTube.
There's a lot of difference between your scenario, and the scenario put forth by OP, in just tone of description alone. You seem to be assuming that I suggested that the OP not be encouraging their son to do anything, and that's not what I said. I said that if their son has no interest in coding except when the OP makes them do it, then maybe programming is not their interest, and if OP ends up causing resentment while still pushing them into that career, then they're potentially setting their son up for a miserable life, and possibly estrangement (depending on all the other parts of their childhood that we here are not privy to).
Let him find his passion. Don’t force him into programming. There’s plenty in the tech space that needs doing. And there’s even more in life that he can do to earn a living that’s not tech related.
The fuck? There are other well paying jobs. Shit electricians and plumbers and other blue collar work can pay 100k plus or more. Skilled labor in the trades is in desperate need at least here in the US.
1) Make him come up with the projects to do. Use brainstorming techniques. Only help by guiding, not by telling him to do specific things
2) Build your similar own projects as well
3) Try with electronics. For that age group I have had good succes with MicroPython on ESP32’s + various sensors/actuators. The first thing I do is connect an LED strip with RGB LED’s and let them play with that.
4) Find him peers with the same interest. In that age peers are better partners. You can still help facilitate a bit, but the best would be to find a Coding club.
Try finding something that he likes, that could be enhanced with programming to start with. Mine was fantasy basketball, doing it with the help of computers is so much better than by hand.
And keep it approachable! There is nothing wrong with writing that fantasy basketball calculator as a spreadsheet.
Spreadsheets have many advantages that get overlooked by pushing for a "real language" while jump into a programming language involves learning a lot of new concepts at once.
For example, spreadsheets make all the memory visible at once. It makes sense like a piece of paper. You also have intuitive understanding of your algorithms memory consumption. Computing something for N by N obviously uses N^2 cells. Many problems will be solved in 2^n which will mean dragging down that cell for a short while at low values and suddenly a very long while.
Leave him alone? School, music, and chess are more than enough for him to invest himself in without you pushing your failed hopes and dreams on a little clone. YouTube videos are also fine, we all like entertainment.
I thought 8 was relatively recent, I only started moving on to it. I am out of the loop, I do not know what I am missing out on in the latest 9 update and kernel. I moved on to mac/brew on the desktop 5 years ago. I use it as UNIX with supported hardware.
