I'm a single parent of a 15-year old daughter. She appears to be quite active with reading. I want to ask your advice. About 6 months ago I happened to walk past my daughter's bedroom late at night and heard a flipping sound. I stopped and stood silently close to her door to try to figure out what it was, and soon I realized that she was probably reading SICP. I have absolutely no liking of Scheme being a Pythonfag myself, but I was very surprised and somehow spellbound to just stand there listening to her. I could hear soft clicks and occasionally more audible sounds that indicated she was typing parentheses. I was shocked and amazed at how long she went on; probably for close to an hour (with numerous apparent pages being read).
The next day when she went to school I stayed home to look around in the room, and eventually I found a box with several books behind a pile of sweaters in a closet. I was just stunned at how seriously she seemed to be experimenting with Scheme. The book I had heard was the legendary SICP. There were also several other Lisp books and various CDs of Common Lisp and Scheme distros. But the most disturbing was a big pile of e-mail printouts, correspondence between her and Gerald Jay Sussman. I spent some time going through this material, and the bottom line is that she had posted an ad for a Scheme instructor a year ago and started an e-mail relationship with this guy. She writes about being constantly turned on by parentheses and describes in detail how she writes code and what her code looks like. The guy encourages her to try new ways to make herself write better code and more easily. It turns out he sent her all these things that she reads. I got the impression that they guy is not really attempting to meet her, but who knows what it may yet turn into.
I am thinking about somehow approaching my daughter about her Lisp fetish, but I haven't decided how to do that without disclosing that I know what she is up to. It would be nice to know what other people think about all this.