Jaden's £1million win is proof parents do not always know what's best for their children

Like many mothers with teenage children, Lisa Dallman says she has despaired over ever getting her son Jaden Ashman to concentrate on his studies or the chores that need doing at home.

But Jaden, 15, has had the last laugh because at the weekend the Essex youngster won more than £1million after coming second, alongside his Dutch teammate, at the Fortnite World Cup finals in New York. Fortnite for the uninitiated is an ever-evolving e-Sports game that is played online for free by millions of gamers.

“Today, after churning his way through several poor paying jobs which helped him to improve his language skills, my son works in the social media department of La Liga, the top division in Spanish football. When I heard about Jaden and his £1million win having driven his mother to despair over his eSports obsession, I was able to afford myself a little smile. ”

After hearing her son tell journalists he was planning to save half his fortune and spend the rest on a new house and the family, Mrs Dallman may have had to reappraise her views of her son's ex-curricular activities and accept that the time he had spent in his room on his computer was time well spent.

I have been through a similar experience to Mrs Dallman, although unlike Jaden who was into eSports, my teenage son was a football obsessive, who spent almost all of his time on social media. My son has never hit the jackpot financially in the way that Jaden has but his 'time-wasting' teenage habits have turned out to be valuable training ground, gaining him a job working for La Liga in Madrid.

As I divorced my ex-wife when our two children were quite young, I did not spend as much time with my offspring when they were growing up as I would have liked. However I was regularly kept up to date on the many arguments my ex was having with our son over him never doing any homework.

At primary school Billy was one of the brightest children in his year group. Indeed his intelligence was so apparent one teacher suggested we hire a tutor so that he could get a place in the local grammar school. This we did and thus, aged 11, he enrolled as a day boy at Devonport Grammar School for Boys in Plymouth having sailed through his 11-plus. However it was after this that things started to go downhill.

The football obsession may have come from me as when he was growing up I never hid my support for Liverpool Football Club. Billy played regularly for his local football team but it was soon clear he wasn't going to light up the local football leagues. However, the analytical side of the sport clearly appealed to him and his evenings were mostly spent on Facebook and Twitter chatting to a rapidly growing band of online friends.

Rather than follow me in supporting Liverpool, a once great team who were going through the doldrums, he latched on to Spanish football. But rather than support Real Madrid or Barcelona - the two Spanish football giants known to everyone – he went for Madrid's relatively obscure second side, Atletico. Amazingly, I learned on the few occasions when he looked up from his iPad, there are thousands of Atletico fans throughout the world. Rather than apply himself to his schoolwork, Billy was developing a huge network of Atletico-supporting online buddies and writing articles for some of the club's many fanzine sites.

While his GCSEs and A-Levels came and went in a haze of arguments between me, him and his mother over how many hours he could spend each day at a computer screen without doing any academic work, his obsession with Atletico Madrid took him to places neither of us could have imagined. For one, once he got a full-time job in the local city sixth-form college, every penny he earned went on subsidising trips to see his team playing at different locations across Europe. His network of cyber friends soon became much more than that as he shamelessly mined this resource for places to stay when his favourite team visited their cities.

In three amazing years from 2014-2016 he managed to attend the two Champions League finals his team played in, visiting cities such as Madrid, Milan, Lisbon, Barcelona and Munich along the way. Bizarrely the key to him obtaining those much-prized Champions League tickets was his membership of the Belgian branch of the Atletico Madrid supporters club!

He also got to know writers on several Spanish football websites and eventually took up an open invitation to stay with one of his friends at their flat in the Spanish capital. Today, after churning his way through several poor paying jobs which helped him to improve his language skills, he works in the social media department of La Liga, the top division in Spanish football.

When I heard about Jaden and his £1million win having driven his mother to despair over his eSports obsession, I was able to afford myself a little smile. She said it had been 'nightmare' getting him to study and she had even threatened to take away his Xbox.

Our battles with Billy were similar in their intensity and meant with the best of intentions. After grammar school and sixth form college we had assumed Billy would go on to university. However his exam grades were disappointing and his references from teachers failed to mask their annoyance that he never did any homework. Certainly it wasn't a surprise when he declared he didn't want to go.

If nothing else, this story should bring heart to the many parents who, like Mrs Dallman, worry about their children spending too much time with their faces pressed up against a computer screen.

Today I joke to my friends about how all the time when my wife and I were having battles with him to get him to do his homework we needn't have worried as all the time he was 'wasting' on social media was actually preparing him for his future career.