Maybe, the point I'm making is that we focus on thinking we know what the best thing for our children will be ("I can teach them the stuff I learned latest and have the most info about and they'll get a better headstart!") and we overlook things that don't fit into that framing.

I got really lucky that my passion was computers and not something less "productive" like art, or more productive but less economically advantageous like farming.

But you won't go wrong teaching your children how to weigh options, make their own decisions and to be good people with principles and tools for helping them understand how to learn new things themselves.

You will probably go wrong pushing your children to be doctors, lawyers or whatever else you want them to be.

You don't seem to be understanding the importance and effect of selection criteria bias.

Much of the personality and intelligence is genetic and that's determined at conception, as for optimum parenting it seems that general indifference yields the best outcomes. There are many ways to damage a person so they won't reach their potential but there does not seem to be many ways to 'make' a person better than they otherwise would have been if they were largely left alone to control their own lives.

Understandably parents want to feel more important and in control, and that their investments will yield good results. And since most people want to feel this way they like to promote messages that reinforce these priors, so the whole platform slowly turns into Linked-In.

I base my assessments on large scale machine learned behavioral analytics done on a full click log history on a non-trivial portion of the US population. Unfortunately I know things about society that I really wish I didn't.