Only the nerdiest child is going to have any fun/interest-in doing anything with Excel VBA and if that were the case, he'd probably already be trying to learn to program. I think Python is a good start if the kid is interested in making websites (even PHP wouldn't be bad). My favorite language is Perl, but teaching him that first would probably cause him to go prematurely bald or start crying. I originally started learning programming in 5th grade in QBasic. I got to middle school, and they were using Apple Basic on Apple IIe's (this was in 1997, yeah, I know... wtf?). I really didn't see the point of learning an essentially dead language on ancient computers, so I started learning Visual Basic to write AOL hacking programs at home. After that I started on Perl and PHP, and databases and web design. In college (the one year I went) they had us working in Java, and I got it, but I didn't particularly like it. Basically, I learned most of the programming skills I've got on my own at home, and what I picked up on and what I didn't were always based on one simple thing - if I was interested, I figured it out really quickly. If I wasn't interested, I'd either have to slave away forcing myself to, or I just said screw it, I don't care enough (that's where C++ went). It's been said in other comments and I totally agree - if there isn't real interest, then the kid won't go anywhere with it.

Not only did reading your post make me want to shoot myself, I think I lost intelligence while doing it. Please tell me you did all that on purpose. Please.

You know you're not dealing with a geek when their penis is longer than their book collection. Or at least they claim that it is

I may be wrong, but I have heard that paying off credit cards every month (and thus not accruing any finance charges) is viewed negatively by financial institutions, and may actually hurt your credit score instead of improving it. They aren't making any money off of you, so they won't raise your credit limit (and why would they need to, if you aren't making purchases that raise your balance close to the limit anyway). While no one wants to be paying huge interest fees, if what I've heard is correct, you may want to just pay the minimum payment once every few months, allowing the interest fees to be charged, and then pay things off. If I'm wrong, I'd love to hear it - but if what I've heard is correct, then I'd hate for someone to put a bunch of effort into raising their credit rating and limits by paying everything off every month, only to find out that it's no different than when they first got the credit line.