Most people who describe themselves as good with computers learned by being handed broken ones. That assignment happens inside families, informally, long before any coursework.
Troubleshooting is learned by exposure, not instruction
Diagnosing a problem means forming a guess, testing it, and narrowing what remains. Nobody teaches that sequence directly; it is absorbed by doing it repeatedly on real machines that matter to somebody.
The stakes are what make the learning stick. A household router that must work tonight produces a different quality of attention than a classroom exercise with a known answer at the back.
So the child who resets the printer, recovers the password and untangles the streaming device is acquiring a genuinely valuable skill that no transcript will ever record.
The assignment is made before it is earned
Families choose the technical child early, often on thin evidence, and the choice then produces the evidence that justifies it. Practice creates the competence the assignment assumed.
Where families default to a son for these tasks, the daughter accumulates fewer hours of unstructured problem-solving even when she started with identical curiosity and identical results in school.
Neither child experiences this as unfair. One simply becomes the person who is asked, and the other becomes the person who waits, and by high school both describe it as a difference in interest.
Permission to break things is part of it
Real troubleshooting involves changing settings you do not fully understand and occasionally making the situation worse before it improves. That requires tolerance from whoever owns the device.
Children who are trusted with that latitude explore further. Children warned not to touch anything learn to escalate to an adult instead, which is a reasonable habit that stops the learning.
It shapes how a first computing course feels
A student who has spent years inside settings menus arrives already familiar with file paths, accounts, updates and the general shape of how systems fail.
Introductory courses assume no prior knowledge on paper, and in practice move at a pace that suits students who have that background, which makes the gap read as talent.
The student without it concludes she is slow at something she has simply seen less of, and that conclusion often arrives within the first two weeks and is never revisited.
The remedy is boring and effective
Deliberately rotating household technical tasks does most of the work, because the mechanism is exposure hours rather than encouragement or role models.
Schools can supply some of it with open lab time on machines students are allowed to misconfigure and restore, which reproduces the household conditions for students who lack them at home.