The way I approach STEM with my own child is not preaenting him with a series of challenges but as a set of tools and opportunities.<p>I do expect to encourage him to engage in competitions like science fairs and Math Olympics, but my experience with those is that they are fun, yield good discipline, and the team activities are just as good at developing team skills as any sport.
I've always felt STEM as yet another compartmentalization of people that create from the business side that manages to own all of the profits from said object/process the STEMs create. A business education is essential to anyone with larger than a job ambitions, so why is an MBA level education not a critical component of a STEM education? Seem like a critical oversight, or intentional for some odd valued reason.