"You may be wondering, Gee, are you sure he might not be interested in some other subject than the one you've been fascinated in for the last thirty years? and frankly I don't know."

Have you actually asked him what he is interested in doing?
I realise that a lot of kids (young men/women) around that age may not know exactly what they want to do with their lives1, but most will at least have a good idea of what type of career does and does not interest them.

"then we'll change course and put him into Political Science or Journalism or something"

Why do you need to put him into anything? Why can't you just let him decide for himself? Maybe I'm misreading, but it really sounds to me like you are pushing the kid to do what you want him to do, rather than let him choose his own way in life.

I have two teenage boys myself, and whilst I wish for them to be happy and sucessful in their lives, I would never ever contemplate pushing them in a career direction that they didn't choose2 for themselves, and were not enthusiastic about pursuing.

Cheers,
Darren :)

1. I'm in my forties, and I still haven't decided what I want to do when I grow up ;)
2. Of course, that doesn't mean I won't/don't offer advice when they ask for it, or on the odd occassion that I feel they might need some :)


In reply to Re: How do I get my teenager interested in software development? by McDarren
in thread How do I get my teenager interested in software development? by talexb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.