One of the problems I had as a child was the lack of exposure to the right tools and books. I was interested in games and knew DOS inside and out (at least from a user's perspective), and could script batch very easily, I had a big gap in getting to the point of writing an actual executable. There was a huge "I didn't know what I didn't know" problem. I envy the children of today with the internet at their fingertips and much more accessible tools, although they still face a similar problem, perhaps in the opposite direction (paradox of choice, perhaps).
