If you're lucky, you'll accidentally turn your child into a hacker.
There are too many awful parents out there for me to believe having kids makes one uniquely qualified to make suggestions. Dismissing ideas with a variation on "you must not have kids" is a huge red flag. It's usually done by people who see kids as things to be controlled and made subservient instead of as adults in progress.
We were all kids once. We all had friends whose parents had different styles, and often we got to see how that turned out. We all have a set of relevant experiences to pull from on the subject. Maybe it won't work for you. That's fine, but maybe you could actually say something about what's wrong with the suggestion instead of issuing a blanket dismissal. Or do the polite thing and ignore it.
You can spare me the condescending "so you don't have kids" that always follows this and just move on if you have nothing better to say.
That is true. But the reverse is not. NOT having kids pretty much guarantees you have mostly romanticized notions about how things should be, and vastly underestimate the issues that parents have to face on a daily basis. Non-parents also seem to universally think that all kids are the same and merely talking to them is enough discipline. It will be enough for a small minority of kids, and nowhere near enough for most. Left to their own devices (if you pardon the pun) most kids will totally veg out and they will be unprepared to face the challenges of adulthood. The goal of a good parent is to make sure it doesn’t happen, even if the kid hates everything you do to make sure of it. Good parents don’t play “friends” with their kids. They’re more of a mix between a close confidant and a demanding manager who is totally prepared to make their kids lives unpleasant if it helps them in the long run.
You will be very quickly disabused of your romanticized notions when you have a child of your own. Until then you should probably refrain from giving parenting advice.
That _is_ a romanticized notion in our particular case. On his own, he quickly runs into obstacles, gets bored, and then fires up YouTube after about 5 minutes, in order to veg out.
I do teach him programming, though. He also does some more with his math tutor that comes in on weekends. He is kind of frustrated with our efforts at educating him. He thinks he should be writing grade-A 3D games right away, even though he utterly lacks both the programming and the math skills to do so. My advice to start with something much simpler has been falling on deaf ears so far.
Without structure, this particular 14 year old would not bathe, would not brush his teeth, would not do homework, would not properly eat, would not go outside or exercise, would not properly sleep, and would substitute all of the above with watching YouTube and playing Minecraft. So you can see why this is a concern.
It sounds like you are being proactive (acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes).
The reason I suggested Minecraft modding and video-making in particular is:
1: It turns his current passive engagement with it into an active, creator role. Most Minecraft mods and media seem to be made by kids, or at least people who started when they were kids. I've read more than a few accounts from people who ended up in CS careers because of Minecraft.
2: Java and A/V are great skills to learn for a variety of possible career paths. Java also translates easily enough to C# and .NET, which also has plenty of career paths.
I don't have kids, but I know enough parents to know how insecure they get when they realize how woefully unprepared their parents and society left them for it, and how often people give lots of useless unsolicited advice. I tried not to do that, but I can see how it might come off that way if you're constantly fending off useless, unwelcome advice and criticisms.
This goes back to the Suzuki method, sort of. In order for a kid to actually enjoy a complicated endeavor he/she must have some baseline set of skills to not suck at it. Acquiring it is often not a pleasant thing even for adults, with lots of effort needed to get to anywhere near where a complex activity can become "fun", and a source of enjoyment.
This is another one of those things I didn't have any problems with: I naturally started very simple and worked my way up. I was only able to do that because I didn't really have much else to do. My father threw away our TV when I was 10 years old and he never bought another one. :-)