Raising Your Successful 35-Year-Old - NYTimes.com

“We should be thinking about the adult we’re raising from the day our children are born,” says Dr. Ginsburg, and that means looking past the goals immediately in front of them to the tenacious, resilient, empathetic, innovative person you hope they will become. No one science project will teach all that, but it’s the cumulative effect of many projects — projects done well, projects done poorly, projects that were big dreams but out of reach and projects that turned out exactly as planned, whether they look that way to adult eyes or not — that builds up the muscles our children need as adults.