Gretchen Rubin's Bus Ride Movie, that is.  Watch it and then take some time to reflect on her message - "The days are long, but the years are short."

Powerful stuff. 

I'm certainly not alone in believing that emphasizing a child's self-esteem at the expense of providing honest feedback is a counter-productive practice.  The problem is, I'm not a scientist or a researcher of any type so I've never been able to provide any evidence to back up that belief.  According to this article , though, researchers are looking at the impact of the self-esteem movement and discovering that my instinct is correct -

Dweck and Blackwell’s work is part of a larger academic challenge to one of the self-esteem movement’s key tenets: that praise, self-esteem, and performance rise and fall together. From 1970 to 2000, there were over 15,000 scholarly articles written on self-esteem and its relationship to everything—from sex to career advancement. But results were often contradictory or inconclusive. So in 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem was polluted with flawed science. Only 200 of those 15,000 studies met their rigorous standards.

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: It’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”

  If your own experience hasn't convinced you, let me put it in simple terms - Success takes hard work and commitment, regardless of one's intelligence or natural ability.  Teaching your children anything different is not doing them a favor.  Better to teach them how to deal positively with set-backs and disappointments and how to capitalize on their strengths and overcome their weaknesses in order to succeed in life.

Who says you can't buy what you need and help others at the same time? Certainly not those who use iGive or Benevolink, a pair of online shopping portals that combine customer purchases of goods and services with targeted charitable contributions. Between the 2 services you can find most every major web retailer from Amazon to Zales, and many hundreds more in between. Both allow you to choose what charities will benefit from your purchases, and iGive even provides information on obtaining tax deductions for charitable contributions made through their program. So, what are you waiting for? You know you're going to make the purchase anyway, so why not make it mean something more?

Two things I believe: First, we shouldn't run to government for help when we can help ourselves. Second, government should provide help to those who can't help themselves. With those thoughts in mind I think you'll agree that this story reflects well on both Lexington and its residents -

They offered refuge from the punishing August heat, and no one came. Even though the thermometer climbed into the 90s yesterday, and the humidity made it feel more like 100, there were no takers on Lexington's offers of air-conditioned respite at three places that had been dubbed Heat Relief Centers.

I didn't live here at the time, but according to the article there was a similar result when Lexington offered shelter to those who had lost heat and power due to the ice storm of 2003. How can you not love an area full of self-reliant people living in a city fully prepared to provide help in case it's needed?