Comment by anthk

Indeed. But in the skills case, ahem, formally, in paper. When I did a finished and advanced trade (pre-University IT, syadmin role), I aced the results as I had plenty of time to even make small patches to BTTV to support my $ELCHEAPO Conceptronic TV card. Having no internet at home made me really 'roguery' on how to achieve stuff, from cracking cable TV to inspect DVB packets, hack cable modems and pirate wifi. No formal education, just by myself, and I could do a trade from age 23 to 27 being lazy as hell because everything was trivial as I could read tons of the bundled books in the Debian Sarge DVD's.

I became really competent on how to 'survive' offline and Unix skills, far more than even the best ones in the grade (and even some math skills from a first year of College, among Lisp), but with really bad social skills but better since I met my SO at age 23 which convinced me to earn a trade. But I'm still a bit depressive for what I suffered.

Parents, listen to your kids, listen to your kids instead of sending them to a therapist, that won't work. Help on their tastes, support them, don't be a hardcore Mc Scrooge Cheapskate. Spoiled kids are bad, OFC, but the polar opposite can be pretty much as dangerous if not more.

I coudn't even spend the money I had on Christmas on my own preferences since age 14 to 18, and I had to return a Chinese Megadrive console clone I won in a holyday lottery bingo in 1997 because you had to actually buy a separate cartridge.

I coudn't even buy cartridges for a NES I've got from my parents' friends because that was 'wasting money'. So, yes, I played all the games my peers got... about 7 years later, feeling myself more and more disconnected from the world and having to do huge efforst to switch from PC gaming and such back and forth. It was tiring. That would really burn you because you are like having to swtich back and forth from totally opposite cultures, my parents' one and my uncle/aunts' one.