Sports can be pretty cheap too, playing soccer in a field is a popular activity with poor British youth.
Sports can be cheap but in extreme cases of (sub)urban sprawl, getting to a field - or the field where an organized game is happening - is pretty difficult without a car. Also you can't really play organized, coached, team sports without your parents signing liability waivers.
If not, I don't know how better off people in the UK can live with themselves. I would also be seriously concerned about my safety in those areas.
Web and iOS things are a dime a dozen, no offence. The only thing that matters is learning and having fun, and doing things your way. You can easily steer your learning towards marketable skills when the time comes.
I learnt programming on my school computers in lunch times and on a graphical calculator. I really didn't have much interest in programming at home.
It almost feels like you didn't read the article, the author talks about more generic problem solving, fixing a bit of tech, building with Lego. They're the core of hacking, that's what we need to stop labeling 'boy' in children's minds.
A hacker needs to be encouraged to tinker. They honestly don't need private web access to do that. Most of my time near computers was supervized, though I didn't think of it that way at the time.
And there are a lot of people who are affected by watching people hang. I doubt any parent would allow their 12 yo access to that.
I did the same. My interest in programming actually started to decrease as my access to the internet increased. This was, however, in the mid-90s, when there weren't the big online communities that there are now.
Just because the internet wasn't accessible 30 years ago isn't a reason to restrict it in the future. The basic methods of learning are totally different today.. Librarys in financial woes. Wifi at Mcdonalds. Cell Phones for everyone. I know my local libraries don't have any of the information I enjoy reading about.
>>And there are a lot of people who are affected by watching people hang.
And your child shouldn't be wanting to watch those videos.
The draw of programming for me was that I do could do interesting work and create something all by myself, by the force of my own mind. I loved it largely because I could do it independently, without mommy and daddy steering. I would have lost interest quickly had it been supervised.
There aren't many other creative activities like that - hardware hacking requires 1) driving to stores to 2) buy parts 3) with money or 4) owning a credit card to order things online. Music requires 1) paying 2) an adult teacher and 3) driving you to lessons. Sports, again, requires money, equipment, and driving. As long as there's a computer and an internet connection, you can teach yourself to program all you want.
(As an aside, Cory Doctorow has a part in Little Brother where he talks about why programming is so amazing - there's really nowhere else where you can make living, acting things with just your thoughts.)
>violent videos
So what? Anyone who's slightly informed about the news sees violence all the time. It's part of living in this world. I watched Saddam Hussein hang on CNN.com and I'm not any different because of it.
>social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around
You might be shady for all I know, but it doesn't matter unless we meet in person. Where your child is going and who he's letting into the house are perfectly legitimate things to supervise and even I wanted to walk into the arms of a predator, it would have been pretty difficult.
As far as Facebook, the shady characters are exactly the same shady characters at school.
>Didn't stop me from learning C and writing games on my TI calculator.
These were the dominant media for a while, but your CLI program in 2014 isn't very interesting to anyone else. Web and iOS applications are, and the web is pretty important if you're going to target these media.