Thirteen-year-old Aman Chishti has figured out keys to success that people twice her age struggle to unlock.

She's turned a passion into profit.

Aman joined the school paper in fourth grade and decided the next year that she wanted to improve her skills. Online, she researched ways to become a better writer. She checked out nearly a dozen books from the public library on how to improve her craft and make it marketable.

She discovered constant-content.com, a place where writers can submit articles for purchase or respond to requests for pieces, and used her father's PayPal account to receive payments.

She sold her first piece, "A practical guide to traveling on an airplane," for around $30.

"I didn't know how to price it ... I ended up under-pricing myself a lot," she said.

I asked her how her enterprise was going.

"I'm not ever writing on spec again," she said.

"Why not?"

"Many of the assignments would fall through, and I didn't have a kill fee," she explained.

I was at least a couple decades older than her before I negotiated a kill fee. Or even knew what one was.

Aman, who lives in Ballwin, Mo., read a few more books about freelancing and decided she might have better luck pitching ideas directly to editors. She taught herself how to write cover letters and queries.

"I'm working on a story about how to deal with pre-wedding jitters," she said.

"You're 13. What do you know about pre-wedding jitters?" I asked her.

She looked at me.

"I interview people."

The future of journalism may not look so grim, after all. "I've been thinking about doing this when I grow up since I was in fifth grade," she said. In the meantime, she has won the school spelling bee every single year since fourth grade. She is saving her money to buy a better camera before she launches a lifestyle blog. She's publishing an anthology of poetry, which involves getting it copyrighted, finalizing cover art, soliciting writers and editing their pieces. She's also handling the promotion and marketing for the book, which she hopes to have ready for sale in a month.

Some level of ambition is innate. But like other personality traits, parents can play a role in nurturing or sabotaging a child's initiative. Aman's parents, who emigrated from Pakistan decades ago, said they noticed the fire in her belly when she was very young.

Aman is the eldest of three children and says her parents are supportive, but have never pushed her to pursue her entrepreneurial ambitions. They keep an eye on what she does online, but they let her do her thing.

"I don't know what to tell you about this," her father, Akbar Chishti, said. "We're glad she's motivated. ... I'm a little afraid of all the time she wants to spend on the Internet, because you have all kinds of people."

Initiative like Aman's doesn't always come naturally, even to people with 10 years on her. I've had parents of college graduates contact me and ask me to help their adult children navigate the industry. I'll tell them to pass along my phone number and email, but it's rare that they follow up and contact me themselves.

To encourage ambition, Tim Elmore, president of Growing Leaders, a nonprofit that offers leadership training and resources, suggests parents have their children specify one or two things at a time they really want to achieve.

"Narrowing focus can be especially challenging for kids with a go-getter spirit, so specific and identified goals are important. Once they identify a goal, help them create a plan to reach it," he said. Also, establish rewards that only come as they demonstrate progress. "This will help separate the idea of 'showing up to lessons each week' from 'putting out effort and practicing on their own time' -- the way goals are actually met and exceeded," he added.

Elmore says well-intentioned parents can end up undermining a child's ambition.

"I think this generation of kids, more than any before, are most susceptible to having their ambition undermined by truly caring, well-intentioned adults. We don't want to see our kids fail, so we think doing things for them will prevent that. But that sends an even more insidious message: 'You aren't capable of doing anything.'"

Aman doesn't bring up her age in her queries because she knows most editors wouldn't take her seriously. But if she needs to sign a contract, she'll have her parents do it and explain why.

"I prefer to let my writing skills speak for themselves," she said. The real-life experience has given her a wisdom beyond her 13 years.

"I learned that there's no way to start out perfect, and not even good, honestly," Aman said. And even though she's managed to make several hundred dollars from her writing projects so far, she's figured out that most writers aren't in it for the money.

"I've learned the only reason you should write is because you love to write."

She has set her sights on writing a novel during National Novel Writing Month this November.

And she's already heard from her mother a refrain that generations of Asian American children have heard prior.

"I told her I want her to write like a hobby, not a profession," Unsa Chishti said.

"I'd like her to be a doctor."

When a former Disney child star gets nasty, it's bound to draw some attention.

When that star is Miley Cyrus, the Internet can chatter of little else for days.

Her infamous performance on MTV's Video Music Awards featured her dancing in a teddy bear-adorned teddie, tongue hanging out, before stripping down to nude undies and gesturing unsubtly with a large foam finger. She shared the stage in a memorable fashion (as in, hard to unsee) with musician Robin Thicke, who sang part of his "Blurred Lines" summer hit.

Besides out-of-touch grown-ups having to explain "twerking" to one another, why does Miley push our buttons so? After all, the VMA stage is where Madonna and Britney Spears shared their open-mouth kiss years ago. It's where celebrities actively try to provoke us.

And Miley was trying so hard.

She's one of the most commercially successful child stars born of the Disney machine. The merchandising, movies and platinum albums have made her one of the richest young celebrities, worth an estimated $120 million.

Thicke's hit was an apt anthem for Miley. She's been blurring the lines between girl and woman for a while now. For those whose children discovered her when she was 12 years old and playing Hannah Montana, her public transformation has been rocky. The road from wholesome to whorish will have some awkward turns.

And awards shows have become modern-day morality plays.

The commercials during the Super Bowl; the jokes, outfits and snubs during Hollywood's awards season; the over-the-top performances at the VMAs: These are the cultural touch points that give the rest of us a chance to bestow our approval or bellow our outrage.

When performers push the envelope, the collective pushback is a societal indignation reset button. Clearly, she pushed too far. If there are standards of taste and acceptable public behavior we wish to impart, the widespread mockery of Miley offered tweens and teens a textbook lesson in what not to do. Parents who made the questionable decision to watch the show live with young children may have had to flip the channel or endure an embarrassing moment.

Asking a young viewer, "Why do you think she wanted to perform that way?" might lead to an interesting conversation. Shocking an audience with a tawdry show is not the only way to garner attention. Perhaps Miley sees it as her only way.

At the end of the day, Miley's goal is to sell more stuff. Whether or not this stunt helps or hurts that cause has yet to be determined. But it's a good reminder to parents that pop culture icons are never reliable role models for our children. Even the Disney-scrubbed versions grow up and struggle to define themselves.

Her spectacle also raised the question of whether we would be as scandalized by a young male star performing as suggestively. Both male and female stars have used their sexuality as a blunt object. If the reaction was any harsher because of her gender, it's largely because the performance failed.

In that blurred space between sexy and vulgar, she gyrated her way into the latter. In the blurred space between provocative and pitiful, she left the audience feeling a little sorry for her.

The Martinez family sat outside on picnic tables in the Texas heat, temperatures rising above 100 degrees, and listened to the story of how some of the refugees made it to this country.

Megan Martinez, 33, studied the murals painted on the fence next to them -- portraits of people who had traveled by packed trains through South America. At various points, the shelter director explained, people would throw food on the train so the passengers could survive until the next stop.

Megan's 17-year-old stepson, Holden, was absorbed in the story told by the director of Casa Marianella in Austin, Texas. Later that evening, Holden would be cooking dinner for the families staying at the shelter. He would take special care to make the spaghetti sauce from scratch for them.

Megan describes this moment of their family vacation as life-changing.

"Seeing my kids understand the system, learning about how people come to live here because it's not safe to live in their own country, seeing the wheels in their heads turning ... as a parent, that was huge."

This was the second summer the Martinezes, who live in the St. Louis area, embraced the idea of vacationing for a good cause. As part of their annual 10-day summer vacation, each family member -- Megan, husband Chris, 41, and their three children, ages 17, 9 and 8 -- took a role in planning a different volunteer project. They drove from St. Louis to Texas and worked on six service projects during the trip. They helped sort donations at a distribution center for the Joplin School District in Missouri. In Dallas, they took down a sunflower display at Peace Community Gardens in preparation for its move to a new location. In San Antonio, they worked a Family Fun Night at the San Antonio Museum of Art. They cooked and served dinner at the refugee shelter in Austin. And they painted and assembled temporary huts for people still living in tents after this summer's tornados in Oklahoma City.

Holden said he got to practice his Spanish while talking to residents at Casa Marianella, and it changed his perspective on the sorts of problems that come up in a typical, middle-class American high school.

"It was kinda cool how they could be so positive and so happy despite all they had been through," he said.

Chris Martinez, who works as the chief development officer for Catholic Charities, and Megan, who works as the recreation director for Missouri's Veteran's Home, are naturally service-oriented people. They wanted to find ways to foster the same spirit in their children and discovered that the family vacation was an opportunity to combine relaxation and volunteering. Each family member researched organizations in advance, then sent emails to see if there were opportunities for the family to help out for a few hours during their visit.

"You can walk out after performing a project and not have to say anything," Chris said. "What they witnessed is so much more powerful than anything my wife or I could say."

It wasn't always easy to follow through on the commitments they had made while planning. Some ideas sound great in theory and feel more challenging in execution.

The night the family arrived in San Antonio, they visited the Riverwalk and enjoyed a late dinner. No one got much sleep, and they did tourist activities the entire next day in the heat. That evening, they had committed to working a family fair night at the local art museum.

"If we were in full vacation mode, we would have probably done nothing. Sat in the A/C, maybe gone to get some ice cream," said Chris. "Getting ready, everyone was very quiet. It was clearly not what people would have chosen to do in that particular moment."

But once they arrived, the energy from the crowd and the event lifted them. The times they would have rather slept in or spent an extra hour by the pool were outweighed by the payoff of being involved in the local community in a way they couldn't be as tourists.

Holden met a man from Colombia at the refugee center and they found a soccer ball at the house. They played soccer together for an hour in the backyard.

His father said they go to their different projects with the intent of giving to others. But invariably, people keep giving back to them.