Not so sure this is necessarily a western thing. When I was a kid in Germany in the 90ies, school started at 7:30, and ended at 13:00. Once a week you had afternoon school from 14:30 to 16:00, and my parents wanted me to have piano lessons once a week. But after 13:00, and on weekends, I was generally free to do whatever I wanted. I played computer games excessively and watched a lot of movies, of course, but I also explored the nearby forest, build tree houses, taught myself how to build a computer, BASIC, Delphi, HTML, CSS and JS, and drew a comic series with a friend (of course we were the only readers). Except for math, everything that helped my through university and my professional life so far I learned in this free time, just by playing.