Kids find what they like and don't like by being exposed to things. Giving your kid a book is not forcing your interests on them, its okay if they don't like it. I think the author is expressing concern over feeling pressured to teach his young child coding. I don't think its probably that helpful to teach young kids syntax. My 10 year old recently started playing with Scratch on her own, bought herself a book about it at a book fair. I think the Scratch approach of putting together the steps you need to accomplish something is much better training than learning specific functions or where to put a semicolon.
I agree with this. My family didn't have money to buy me things, but I found ways to get into computers and programming myself. In the 7th grade I started helping the school computer teacher run the IT systems because the school didn't know how to do it themselves. In exchange for helping the school manage the computers, they let me play on the computers after school and install BSD and Linux on an older machine that became my toy.
You’re right, they should find their own interests. However, kids are preyed upon and lots of trivial things are competing for their attention. As a parent you might help then decide when they can’t. Also as a parent one might expose them to different things and build projects together and programming may be one of those. Others may be musical instruments, books, math, sports and other things that put them on a good path. But yes, forcing ones kids to program is not likely to be fruitful.
Kids need to learn things themselves and walk their own path. Sure you can guide them away from bad things, but there is too much hand holding and coddling of young people these days. One example is lining playgrounds with rubberized material, resulting in an increase in injuries. Another example is keeping kids away from peanuts which causes an increase in peanut allergies.
Ruberizing playgrounds leads to more injuries? Interesting, I didnt know that. Keeping kids who are not alergic to peanuts away from peanuts is stupid. I let mine eat everything but sugary things and junk foods. My nephew however is alergic to peanuts and was about to die once if it wasnt for an epipen at hand
The rubberizing thing is similar to the helmet effect with bicycles: injuries tend to increase when people wear helmets while riding bicycles, likely because they're more willing to take risks.
As far as peanuts go, it's out of my area of expertise but as I understand it there's an autoimmune response to the proteins in peanuts, and there's a link to people who don't have exposure to those proteins in their infancy.