But also my 12 year old daughter is working on publishing her first iOS app on her own initiative. I’m sure they’ll do fine.
My daughter is 3yo so a bit early ^^, but 2 years ago I bought my nephew (then 8, loves to tinker) a Pi 400 plus a couple of kid-oriented introductory programming books (about Scratch and Python, very nicely done I must say, I reviewed them beforehand). Of course he started with playing Minecraft Pi but an hour after he was moving a cat around in Scratch.
Now I heard he's tinkering with Python. Pretty sure the GPIO is going to get some heavy use down the road, bridging the digital world to the physical one (where he tinkers with mechanical and electric stuff already).
There was zero pushing nor action on my part (except showing him how to operate the mouse), I literally just handed him the device and books over, he plugged it in and went exploring his merry way. Curiosity is a powerful engine.
That's all she needed, really. She graduated from that to Swift Playgrounds on my iPad, then once she had some understanding of Swift and programming in general she was solving problems on replit. Not sure yet how she'll jump the gap to making actual apps, but that's her goal and she's trying. She doesn't have to do it alone though; I'll help out as needed.
My family goes back to the 1830’s on one side, and the 1600’s on the other, so I’m pretty integrated. I don’t think any of that is really in the radar for people in my family. We are relatively well off middle class, and most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins went to university. But not Yale, Harvard, or MIT. We didn’t do cram schools, but did band or soccer or theatre instead. Whatever our interests were.
Cram schools and intense stress related to academic achievement is more typical of recent immigrants, and/or particularly though not exclusively East Asian and South Asian families. When I sat for the SAT I was shocked that some of the people I sat next to had been attending study schools for months to prepare. Me and my friends just sat for it and took it cold, lol. There is a much stronger drive in that culture for academic achievement and living up to your parent’s expectations. In many-generational American families, not so much (not just white, but anyone whose family has been here for a while).
