[freehunter]

Although I recognize that this topic is specifically about girls, this is important with kids in general and not just daughters. My uncle is a programmer with more than a few lines running in Red Hat and various other large projects. He works for a large company writing code in C, assembly, Python, whatever is needed. He is a programmer, and that is his life.

He also has a teenage son, who cannot write a single line of code despite the obvious will to learn.

I've tried teaching the boy over Skype. I've written tutorials, done my best to help him. Although I am not a programmer, I was willing to learn with him. But as much as he wanted to learn, he didn't want to learn it from me or from O'Reilly or from anyone else. If even his professional programmer of a father won't give him a few minutes of his life a couple times a week, how can anyone else hope to drive the boy's ambition?

A kid shouldn't be expected to keep pressure on their parents to help them learn, that should be an intrinsic value distilled in all parents. Your story has you sounding like an adult version of my cousin, looking back on a missed moment. That kind of makes me sad. Don't waste time with your kids. Opportunities like that don't stay around forever.