Summary from Janill:

1. Music Lessons
2. The Dumb Jock Is A Myth
3. Don’t Read To Your Kids, Read With Them
4. Sleep Deprivation Makes Kids Stupid
5. IQ Isn’t Worth Much Without Self-Discipline
6. Learning Is An Active Process
7. Treats Can Be a Good Thing — At The Right Time
8. Happy Kids = Successful Kids
9. Peer Group Matters
10. Believe In Them

Smarter=Successful=Happy (of course more to it than that, but it is a good base to start from ;)

Taken from the notes about the Time magazine version of this article:

http://pandawhale.com/post/38566/how-to-make-your-kids-smarter-10-steps-backed-by-science-timecom

My favorite is #5:

Self-discipline beats IQ at predicting who will be successful in life.

From Charles Duhigg’s excellent book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business:

Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success… Students who exerted high levels of willpower were more likely to earn higher grades in their classes and gain admission into more selective schools. They had fewer absences and spent less time watching television and more hours on homework. “Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable,” the researchers wrote. “Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not.… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”

Grades have more to do with conscientiousness than raw smarts.

This is as true in real life as it is in school.