Raising brave, imperfect daughters, and teaching them to code

Last week I came across a tweet sharing Reshma Saujani’s TED talk, titled “Teach girls bravery, not perfection“. I immediately bookmarked it to watch with my daughter (and tweeted my plan to do that).

I'm going to watch this with my daughter. She's 7 years old and we've talked a lot about making mistakes, and courage.

— Paul Jacobson (@pauljacobson) June 20, 2018

Saujani replied to my tweet, and asked me to let her know what my daughter thought of the talk.

So, I watched the talk on Saturday morning with my 7 year old (along with my son). Afterwards, I asked her what she thought about what Saujani said about how important it is to be brave, rather than being perfect, and how the quest for perfection is so self-defeating.

My daughter said she liked the video. I asked her to elaborate, and she commented on this talk has inspired her to try to learn to code again. She said that she stopped trying the first time around because she kept making mistakes.

I noticed this when I introduced her to coding on Code.org last year. She started off really excited to see what she could create after watching me learn front-end web development for most of last year. But she soon gave up when the exercises became trickier and she found herself making mistakes.

Since watching the talk, she’s been asking me when she can get back to learning to code. It also helps that my son has also returned to learning to code after seeing me return to Python (I’ve started at the beginning with Python 3).

Now all I need to do is pick a learning platform for her to learn with. So far, Code.org and Scratch look like good options for her.

Photo by Jelleke Vanooteghem on Unsplash