Please, do your kids a favour: have them learn an instrument to an "expert" level by the time they're 13. Do not let them quit. If not an instrument, then something else.
If it's anything I see around me in my daily work, it's a bunch of people who never get shit done.
"If you don't have this habit by the time you're a teenager, you're never going to get it."
Habits are learned patterns habituated by positive or negative feedback cycles throughout life. Habits range from social skills (are you the social butterfly or the quiet kid who keeps to himself), to health (exercise a lot and eat well or lounge around watching tv and eating Doritos), to work ethics and more.
We are all, as individuals, the collection of habits that we have learned over the years. A frequent topic here on HN is how you can go about hacking yourself to change your habits. A popular one is to force yourself to talk to random different strangers every day in order to 1) break the habit of being shy, and 2) learn the skills necessary to make friends with people easily. For many people, this is successful.
Being a teenager is only the first small part of a person's life. We continue to grow and mature and have new experiences all throughout our life. Those are much more important than the awkward and often painful childhoods we all endure. Even when we're on our death beds, we still learn new things.
I myself was an introverted kid. As a teenager, I was an arrogant s.o.b that thought I was better than most people around me. When I was 17, during that summer I played baritone in a drum corps and had such a set of experiences that even then I could viscerally feel the change in my outlook on life and on others. Throughout my 20s I began to get more perspective on life and bad habits I had growing up melted away.
Now here I am in my early thirties (31 at the time of writing this), and I can feel my perspective on life changing again. I stopped getting angry about things a couple years ago. Literally when everything seems to be breaking and failing around me, I just find it funny and keep working through it. That happened again a few weeks ago. I'm at a point now where if I am getting depressed, I can rationally sense where my emotional state is heading and most of the time do things to bring myself out of it early.
I'm able to recognize my bad and good habits and I'm able to make conscious choices now to change what I want to change. Its not easy, but I'm able to do it.
So I hope that for everyone else that I'm not unique, and that your statement is untrue. Else its a sad life that human beings are meant to lead.
The point is really the following: * Pick a long-term thing * Finish it * Do this a lot of times * Get good at finishing
It's a really hard thing to learn post teenage years. I had the same problem but started fixing it in my mid-teens. I couldn't finish anything before then. But then I started a couple of music businesses which were very interesting to me and I learned to finish what I started.
Compared to my 10 year old daughter who can now zip through many long-term projects with appropriate levels of planning. At her age, I remember basically not finishing any school work. She started out the same but working on a lot of projects, she's learned to finish what she starts.
The natural state of a human being is to be stagnant. It's very few people who continuously try to improve themselves. Therefore, get the continuous improvement habit as early as possible.