Millennials Had to Fix Their Own Computers—Shouldn’t Our Kids?

How I’m making sure my son knows what's under the hood

It’s easy to take modern tech for granted. Walk into any store, pick up a laptop or tablet, and you can expect it to run smoothly for five years or more—no troubleshooting required. Unless you have extremely specialized needs, you don’t have to think twice about what’s inside. Even power users barely need to keep up as chipmakers keep obliterating performance benchmarks.

This is great… but it also worries me.

I don’t want my kids to think of computers as magical black boxes. Not because I expect them to become engineers, but because a basic understanding of how things work builds confidence. Confidence that they don’t always need to run to Mom or Dad—or worse, the Genius Bar—when something breaks.

Millennials like me had an unfair advantage in learning tech: our Boomer parents had no idea how to use it. If we wanted to play a game, we had to figure out how to install drivers. If the family computer stopped connecting to the internet, we had to fix it or no one got online. That trial-and-error education turned us into the family IT department.

So, I’ve decided to pass some of that hands-on experience down.

For my son’s fifth birthday, we’re going to build a computer. Not a full-blown, high-end PC—he’s not quite ready for a MicroCenter shopping spree—but a simple, inexpensive project with a Raspberry Pi Starter Kit. We’ll assemble it, connect a monitor, and install Ubuntu from the command line.

Raspberry Pi 5

Will he fully grasp what we’re doing? Probably not. But he’ll see that computers aren’t just magic—they’re something he can understand, experiment with, and even fix.

And that’s a start.