Boredom can be filled with... books! I think that going for a "personal computing device" first is in general a bad idea and I'm really glad for the first ~14 years of my life I also didn't have any because I'm not sure I would have had the self control to avoid just getting suckered in, and I feel lucky I developed a reading habit instead.
Nah. I had plenty of books, and I was a pretty heavy reader as a kid, but I still had way more boredom than I was happy with. As soon as I got access to Wikipedia, though, the number of words I read per day skyrocketed.
