[brainstorm]
The Dangerous Book for Boys
Snip, Solder and Burn
Basic robotics stuff, something related to Arduino?
They're cheap enough.
Introduce him to Scratch or some other development tutoring environment for kids.
Subscription to Wizard 101 :)
A trick bike?
Nerf is a nice alternative to BB. You don't get to shoot cats with it though.
Build a water rocket. Did that with my boy. He was suitably impressed.

Look, you don't have to leave off with a gift. The stuff you do together leaves the best memories. Stuff passes away. Good memories, especially after 10 years of age, tend to stick.

As I mentioned, it was two working parents and the move to surburbia. (Well, I said non-walking-friendly neighborhoods, and didn't elaborate). This was what changed.

These suburbs, often designed after 1950s, were designed for car travel, rather than walking or biking. Many suburbs are designed with streets as fractals, often without sidewalks. It might be a "safe" subdivision, but there was a real risk in being run over by cars. Kids living in suburbia had to be driven everywhere for activities.

It's no coincidence that the kids growing up in that environment and coming into adulthood have increasingly moved to gentrified neighborhoods (the ones designed for walking). There has been a decline in buying cars. Whether that means allowing the kids to have free play remains to be seen. (But I suspect, things like the popularity of the books, The Dangerous Book for Boys, The Daring Book for Girls are indicative).

The fact that this kind of article needs to be written in the first place seems to confirm that there's so many basic things that people just don't learn how to do anymore, because exponential advances in technology have changed our lives so drastically that we just no longer run into the situations where we would organically learn those things.

Especially with the internet, it's easier than ever to shut yourself in and never go out into the real world and have real meaningful interactions, while still feeling like your online life is full of real, meaningful interactions. Just immerse yourself into a sub-community filled with 2k people, and you feel like a social butterfly.

And it's not just social lives. Things like learning how to interact in basic ways with your cashier at the store, or how to make new friends outside of work, so many of us just don't know how to do this, because our heads were in The Cloud™s while we texted and browsed reddit in line at the grocery store.

Things have even changed profoundly within a single generation. When I was in school, Tamagotchis were the thing. When my little brother was in school, his teacher was using YouTube to teach them. Now my son is in high school and all his classmates have Android phones, which are such a game changer that they aren't even allowed to even have them turned on in school.

And going back a little further, my oldest son and daughter have The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls which teach stuff that 100 years ago everyone knew, and now you need to buy novelty books to learn, despite many of the skills and tricks these books teach still being useful.

It is a form of dry pedantic humor. In early 20th century USA, there were a lot of instructional books marketed at children with titles like this... "A Boy's Guide to Fishing", and so on.

The author, who wishes finance students to remain focused on the fundamentals rather than getting lost in esoterica, chose a title that harkens back to these plain-spoken primers. I suppose he didn't stop to think that most of his audience wouldn't get the reference.

It's about as un-PC as "The Dangerous Book for Boys", really (which my daughter read without being noticeably triggered).