My experience is that children should be exposed to as much as possible, microscopes, telescopes, chemistry sets, music instruments, summer camp, sports, art, science, math, more books than they can read, computers, legos, more and more.

This is how I was raised and even though both of my parents were alcoholics and life growing up was "not fun much of the time at home"; however, despite my parents addiction to alcohol, they did a great thing to expose me to everything and gave me every opportunity to learn.

As a kid, I used to hide in the attic of our house and play with chemistry sets, microscopes, model cars, trains and planes, multimeters, read sci-fi books, play chess - anything to escape my parent's alcoholic wrath.

It is wrong for adults to restrict children from any "main stream" form of knowledge and learning and it is wrong for adults to impose their will (on what children should learn or what tools they should use to learn) too strongly on children. Give children science, math, art, literature and let them learn what they want to learn.

Maybe how I was raised (given every tool imaginable and not scolded for being interested in math, science, technology, motorcycles, musics... everything!!) is why I continue to learn to code in new languages today, learn new systems today, and why I am very comfortable even at this advancing age, to be forever young and to learn new things every day.

I learn a lot of tech from younger people and from older people (however, the number of younger people far outpaces the number of older people for me now, LOL)

Perhaps this is the reason I am constantly amazed at all the folks who are """experts""" and are great at some narrow aspect of technology yet grumble and complain about "new technology" and for the most part, refuse to learn new tools and frameworks.

In the past week, I have finished one book on current political events, one book on the science of sleep, and am now nearly finished with a physics book on black holes. The week before, two sci-fi books. I have written many lines of production code in HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery and PHP in the last week and have debugged an entire system port to a new datacenter.

It's really important, I think, not to worry about what others do; and just do your best, learn every day, and embrace change and knowledge with passion and zeal.

That's what I think.