Everybody here seems to want to dish out advice, but I'd like to turn the mic to you. I'm a new parent with two kids under 3. I also started my career my learning HTML/CSS on my own in the early 2000s. It was a different world back then. What are you most grateful for about how your parents raised you, and what constraints did they impose? I want to protect my kids from all the crap, but don't want to stifle their creativity and desire to learn freely.
I totally agree, growing up nowadays is extremely different then what it must've been like before. I'm grateful for my parents encouraging me to play outside and make friends, and once they found out that I was interested in programming, they encouraged that as well.
They always want me to try new things and see if I love it, and that's what I found with programming. They do have some rules about it, and can see what websites I visit, and generally what I do online.
I'd say to let them do what they find interesting, like my parents did with me and programming, but still encourage them to try new things. You never know, they might find more things that they love :)
My parents didn't let me drop out of Elementary school but I ended up dropping out of college to work as a game designer for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigWorld . I was fortunate enough to meet their CEO because my family supported me by traveling with me to a couple conferences where I got to meet the industry.
Things that would have gone better for me: parents working with me on my projects as project manager / guiding production schedules. I'm not saying tell your kids what to do, let me explain:
I spent a lot of time drawing games in notebooks & programming 10% finished projects in my teens. I wish I had produced finished games (/s/games/$project_type for your kids) earlier and gotten a serious head start on game development.
I also wish my parents had encouraged or forced me to exercise more. I do now, but only after health problems forced me to start paying attention to my body!
I wish they didn't let me drink so much soda and red bull too. Keep that crap away from your kids, no matter what the other's are doing.
You having experience with HTML/CSS + everything else you know could be great for teaching your kids programming. Even if they go into other disciplines, I think "learning how to think" from programming + problem solving is invaluable and can apply to every area.
Congrats on your new family!
For my part, I just wish I'd have read some good books on health and physical fitness. I think I would have gotten it, and been in to it, if only I understood how much health and physical fitness mattered -- not just to protect your body from disease and injury, but also to improve your mood, give you more energy, and help motivation.
Another thing to keep in mind that the easiest time in one's life to get stronger (something that will help protect you from injury later on in life) is when you're going through puberty, when your body is filled with natural growth hormones. People in their teens are able to very quickly achieve results that older people struggle for much longer to achieve (if they ever do).
Instead of exercising when I was young, though, I focused exclusively on intellectual pursuits... even kind of buying in to the whole "nerd vs jock" dichotomy, and proudly considering myself a nerd, and felt like any kind of physical pursuits were below me. In retrospect, that was a really narrow-minded, ignorant, and harmful point of view. There's no reason you can't pursue both the intellectual and the physical -- and you'll probably be a lot healthier that way, and suffer a lot less later in life.
Exercise also affects one's weight, body image, and self-esteem -- things that so many people suffer from (especially in fields like tech where most people sit in front of their computer all day). You could get a head start on avoiding all that if you start exercising young and turn it in to a habit that you maintain throughout your life.
Can you expand this? What is that crap that kids need to be protected from?