I have this ongoing argument with my kids because they want to hunt-and-peck with one or two fingers per hand and to me that’s like swimming with one arm when you have another arm and two whole legs to use.
Of course I don't know what would have happened if I'd started with touch typing. Although in fact I tried to learn touch typing with Mavis Beacon not long after it appeared, but it cramped my fingers almost instantly, so I stopped.
As for typing in general - depending how old your kids are, I'd consider the possibility that by the time they reach college age typing will be as much use to them as handwriting is to current students. I.e. some value, but not as important as other skills.
I'd be very surprised if we don't have conversational interfaces with human-level comprehension within twenty years - possibly ten at a push.
You might think code will always be typed, but I honestly wouldn't be sure about that.
An unexpected benefit is my hands and wrists are positioned in such a way that I don’t get much strain / carpal tunnel. My hands get more stressed from using the touchpad than typing.
I don't hunt-and-peck, but I'm also not perfectly keeping at rest on the home row. The result is mostly touch-typing, but if I don't have the keyboard in my peripheral vision, I start to drift.
Really just means I can't sit in complete darkness, but I'm sure it would have some implications if I were to try and use VR with anything that requires actual typing.
I took typing as an elective one semester in high school because I couldn’t stand hunt and pecking when I was trying to get things done. We’d get done early and just type out lyrics to House of the Rising Sun. We’d also replace homonyms or type nonsense lyrics. A few years later internet chat rooms were big and I’d be in half a dozen of them plus various private chats. My wpm ended up being such that people who saw me in real life would notice the speed. Easily over 100 wpm (not 350 though!).
These days I very quickly adapt to macros, function keys, and remappings. I type nearly as fast as I can think of the words. I thumb-type on the phone noticeably fast (lead singer of a bar band called me out on my speed one NYE). And I memorize my passwords physically. I lay that all at learning to touch type in the first place.
I noticed that between my two kids, both graduated from high school now, the one who never learned to type had a hard time throughout school because of it. If there's a physical obstacle to typing, it will translate into a difficulty learning to write. They did vastly more writing in school than I ever did.
In college, I preferentially chose courses where the grades were based on written work rather than exams, and I got to the point where I could sling text like nobody's business. I was also the first student at the college to submit a word processed paper.
I don't know if typing should necessarily affect coding. After all, you really shouldn't be coding faster than you can think anyway. What matters is how much good code you can write, and that might include time spent away from the keyboard altogether.
Now if I could only find something similar for learning piano.
These days though, I've memorized the positions of all of the keys, so while I _mostly_ use my index fingers to type, I also will switch to thumbs or other fingers on occasion depending on the keyboard. I rarely if ever look at the keyboard.
So it's almost like I use a combination of touch typing with pecking. Works well enough for me and my WPM isn't bad, either.
I actually genuinely enjoyed it. The force of the long-throw of the manual keys was fun to feel, and the different heights of the rows made it pretty easy to learn where your fingers should be. It did always annoy me a little to use the lower-case l as the number one, though.
I don't think typing quickly helps you code more quickly per se. But it certainly helps me write out comments more quickly; and at some point, a big chunk of your time is spent arguing^W discussing with people about how to code properly; at that point, being able to type more quickly is a big advantage.
It’s not particularly useful outside of IM where you can get your thoughts out before getting interrupted.