[voz_]

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.

[waboremo]

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.

[cinntaile]

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.

[LocalH]

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).