Honestly, most parents think they’re helping their kids get ahead by buying a $2,000 laptop and downloading a flashy app with a cartoon bird. They aren't. Not really. Teaching kids computer programming has become this weird, frenetic gold rush where the focus is on "coding" rather than "thinking," and that’s a massive mistake.
I’ve seen seven-year-olds who can drag-and-drop blocks in Scratch for hours but can't explain what a loop actually does in the real world. It’s frustrating. We’ve turned a creative, logical superpower into another check-the-box extracurricular activity. If you want your kid to actually understand technology—not just consume it—you have to change your perspective.
Coding is just syntax. Logic is the engine.
The Syntax Trap and Why Block Coding is Just the Start
Most people start with Scratch or Blockly. These are visual languages developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. They’re brilliant. They remove the "syntax error" frustration that used to make kids quit back in the 80s when a single missing semicolon in BASIC would crash the whole system. But here’s the kicker: if you stay in the land of blocks too long, you’re just playing a video game. You aren't building one.
Transitioning from "this looks like a puzzle piece" to "this is a line of Python" is where most kids fall off a cliff.
Mitchel Resnick, the LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at MIT, has spent decades arguing that coding should be a form of "self-expression." He compares it to writing. You don't learn to write just to become a professional novelist; you learn to write to communicate your ideas. Teaching kids computer programming should follow that same path. It’s a literacy, not just a job skill.
Forget the Career, Focus on the Brain
Stop worrying about whether your third-grader will be a Senior Dev at Google in 2040. The AI landscape of 2026 is already changing what "being a programmer" even means. Generative AI can write boilerplate code in seconds. What it can't do—at least not well—is deconstruct a complex, messy human problem into a series of logical steps.
That’s called computational thinking.
It involves four main pillars:
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- Decomposition: Breaking a big problem (like "clean my room") into tiny steps (pick up one sock, put it in the bin).
- Pattern Recognition: Realizing that "picking up a sock" is the same action as "picking up a toy."
- Abstraction: Focusing only on the important details and ignoring the fluff.
- Algorithmic Design: Creating the step-by-step instructions to get the job done.
If you teach a kid these four things, they can learn any language. Python, C++, Swift—it won't matter. They’ll have the mental framework.
The Screenless Secret: Unplugged Activities
You don't need a computer to start teaching kids computer programming. In fact, it's often better if you don't use one at first.
Try the "Robot PB&J" experiment. It’s a classic. You tell your kid you are a robot and they have to give you exact instructions to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Kid: "Put the peanut butter on the bread."
You: (Puts the entire jar on top of the loaf).
Kid: "No! Open the jar first!"
It’s hilarious. It’s messy. But it teaches them the most fundamental lesson of computer science: computers are incredibly fast, incredibly powerful, and incredibly stupid. They only do exactly what you say, not what you meant.
Choosing the Right Path: Python vs. JavaScript vs. Lua
Eventually, the blocks have to go.
When you make that jump, don't just pick the "most popular" language. Pick the one that fits their interest.
If your kid lives in Minecraft, they might want to learn Java. If they’re obsessed with Roblox, they need Lua. Roblox uses a specific API that allows kids to build entire worlds and actually monetize them. I know 14-year-olds making five figures a month on Roblox. That’s a hell of a motivator.
For general purposes? Python is king. It looks like English.
print("Hello World")
Compare that to C++:
#include