This year's NJ Hunting and Trapping Digest has an article (pg 76-77) about getting your kids interested in hunting. Written by a dad who is also a hunter and state biologist. I don't know anything about the subject, but it seems well written and full of good advice. (It a picture of the author hunting with his 15-month old son riding in his backpack, then 11 years later the same boy as a youth hunter.)
I was very fortunate and more than a little lucky to be raised as a hunter and fisherman by a Dad who lived the first 40 years of his life in the City of Camden. Except for his service in the Navy during WWII, he never ventured very far from Camden.
My family moved to Gibbsboro in 1957 and my Dad's co-worker got him interested in hunting. He bought a gun at Sears along with all of the stuff he needed to bird hunt and deer hunt and off he went. I couldn't wait to join them as I was growing up and I would wait by the door at the end of the day each time they went out to see how they did.
He got my first shotgun at 10 and that was my first year of hunting. I shot rabbits, squirrels and a pheasant that first year and I was hooked. We always deer hunted six-day until I was in my late teens but we were never successful, mainly because my Dad and his co-worker were far from experts and the Outdoor Channel and cable TV didn't exist yet.
At age 14 a kid can hunt on his own without parental supervision, even today. Once I turned 14, I hunted far more than my Dad because I would go out after school and rabbit hunt behind my house and in the summer I hunted crows. My friends and I hunted crows almost every day in the summer on Dobbs' Farm that used to be across from the Echelon Mall.
Hunting and the shooting sports in general teach values, ethics and skills that will last a lifetime.