cr0sh,
I bet your parents were very good parents. I also owe mine a lot. My dad was a professor in electron science but he didn't really teach me electronics. We didn't spend much time together because he spent countless time in his lab. The first time I felt interest in electronics was right after I finished a gruesome task of teaching 3xx-level electronics for physics majors. It seems that physicists don't like to either teach or do electronics. When anything gets too practical, it's out the physics door. I owe partly of my employment to saying "oh yes, I am certainly willing to teach electronics" during interview 
Keff, I was intimidated by bare electronics parts as well, also the mentioning of designing PCB, or manufacturing hundreds of them. But all those were history now.
I think what helped me are three things: I have some money to buy parts (wouldn't work if I were half my age), I stumbled into the Arduino world with such a lively and helpful online community, my background in programming. As a physics major like most other physics majors, I only took one class in electronics in my junior year and that was it. Even after I taught the class, I still wasn't very interested in it. Until one time I came up with an idea that will be a teaching equipment. I used all my knowledge and couldn't figure out how to make it work. A very haphazard chance made me meet an artist, artist everyone! He was using arduino and he showed me what he did with arduino. After that I read about arduino and made the purchase. Eventually I made that teaching design work. It's not very good-looking but it's showed me the potential of arduino. I've been a fan since that time (around 2009). With my programming background, all I needed are ideas and time. The rest was just hard labor 
So looks like many are interested in this topic. We should certainly chat often on this board. I think I've got like 1000% what I was expecting when I started this post XD XD XD Thanks to you all!