Rich/divorced parents?
nope and nope
I just got really, really good grades all the time as a kid. My parents would make deals with my siblings and I - every time we'd make straight A's, we'd get a present. My brother and sisters were slackers and never seemed to put in the work, but me? I didn't make a B until senior year of highschool, ever. That meant every 6 weeks I basically got some sort of awesome gift. Usually it was something like a video game or an RC car. But they'd sweeten the deal for holidays - if I could go an entire year of straight A's, then they'd get me a new piece of hardware for christmas. Hence how I was able to get both a Sega CD and 32X and game gear and so forth - I was busting my ass making straight A's at a magnet school.
I remember working so, so fucking hard for Sonic & Knuckles. I was in the 4th grade, and during this time I was in a local NASA co-op program where they'd take me out of elementary school to a local university to take advanced math courses. Math has always been my Achilles heel. That particular 6-week period revolved around trigonometry, and I remember we were learning about arc sin, arc tangent, and arc cosine, and it was sooooo fucking hard to grasp. The day I got my reportcard I did flips because I knew it meant I was going to get Sonic & Knuckles. SOHCAHTOA - I still remember (and use) it to this day. Funnily enough, what made me actually grasp and understand those concepts was applying it to Sonic the Hedgehog itself and coming to understand how to move through a loop using trig.
Also, I used to mow lawns around the neighborhood starting at age 11, and funcoland let me really take my money far.