How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

by Paul Tough

What’s more, researchers have found that there is something uniquely out of balance about the adolescent brain that makes it especially susceptible to bad and impulsive decisions. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, has analyzed two separate neurological systems that develop in childhood and early adulthood that together have a profound effect on the lives of adolescents. The problem is, these two systems are not well aligned. The first, called the incentive processing system, makes you more sensation seeking, more emotionally reactive, more attentive to social information. (If you’ve ever been a teenager, this may sound familiar.) The second, called the cognitive control system, allows you to regulate all those urges. The reason the teenage years have always been such a perilous time, Steinberg says, is that the incentive processing system reaches its full power in early adolescence while the cognitive control system doesn’t finish maturing until you’re in your twenties. So for a few wild years, we are all madly processing incentives without a corresponding control system to keep our behavior in check. And if you combine that standard-issue whacked-out adolescent neurochemistry with an overloaded HPA axis, you’ve got a particularly toxic brew.

why stress in adolescence is particularly damning

Far from avoiding talk of family breakdown, advocates like Steve Gates seemed preoccupied with it, and they were quite explicit that they wouldn’t need to be doing the work they were doing if Roseland’s families were functioning the way families should.

roseland theyre trying to address family problems and bad coping strategies for at risk adolescents

But sometimes it did work, and the transformations that YAP’s advocates were able to inspire in their clients were often stunning.

anecdotally nice but let's make sure he gives data too. i'm sure there are amazing stories from before YAP as well (the 4% who did go to college?)

“That was the way for me to relieve the stress. I didn’t talk to people about my problems. I just let them build up inside until I was ready to explode. And so when I got to school, as soon as someone said something to me that I didn’t like, I’d take my anger out on them, because I knew I couldn’t hit my mama.”

wow i wonder if she was always aware that this is what she was doing or did this realization come through counseling? seems that if the emotional brain has developed but the cognitive one has not, this realization would be difficult or impossible to come by

Many education advocates are skeptical about these innovations, which often seem to be nothing more than a new way for school systems to get rid of their most-difficult-to-teach students, sending them out into the world with diplomas but not real educations. But for Keitha, who was more than ready to get away from Fenger, the courses were a godsend, and for the first time in her academic career, she actually worked hard at her classes; she attended night school five days a week and often stayed at Fenger from eight in the morning till seven at night.

with the argument in the book it seems it may actually matter at least as much how much they learn academically. if they can set a long term goal and make a plan to achieve it and execute the plan, they're way ahead of the game!

They may not have been low in IQ, but they were low in whatever quality it is that makes a person try hard on an IQ test without any obvious incentive. And what Segal’s research shows is that that is a very valuable quality to possess.

big predictor of success, especially among lower performers: how hard they try on meaningless tasks? they just have inner motivation to do well and it pervades their lives?

But the more accurate predictor of which cadets persisted in Beast Barracks and which ones dropped out turned out to be Duckworth’s simple little twelve-item grit questionnaire.

ok so what're the questions?! Also just went to a session with someone who claimed that grit has been debunked (I have no specific data to share though).

In Kindlon’s survey, parents making more than one million dollars a year were, by a wide margin, the group most likely to say that they were less strict than their own parents.

tell jen: rich parents are less strict

The third method is called mental contrasting, and it combines elements of the other two methods. It means concentrating on a positive outcome and simultaneously concentrating on the obstacles in the way. Doing both at the same time, Duckworth and Oettingen wrote in a recent paper, “creates a strong association between future and reality that signals the need to overcome the obstacles in order to attain the desired future.”

3 strategies to approach long-term goals: optimists envision how great it'll be to succeed, pessimists dwell on obstacles in the way, but only successful strategy is to think about both at same time…think of obstacles but also how to overcome them and achieve goal…come up with ways to identify and head off obstacles in advance (sort of getting close to nudge i think). [note: not sure what this nudge reference means.]

creating a series of “implementation intentions”—specific plans in the form of if/then statements that link the obstacles with ways to overcome them, such as “If I get distracted by TV after school, then I will wait to watch TV until after I finish my homework.”

if / then statements for obstacles to anticipate an decide IN ADVANCE what the behavior change must be to avoid obstacle. use intellectual brain to override impulsive ahead of time.

So we are left with a conundrum: Why are so many American students dropping out of college just as a college degree has become so valuable and just as young people in the rest of the world have begun to graduate in such remarkable numbers?

high college enrollment but second lowest graduation rte in OECD, at the same time that advantage of college degree is higher than ever before. what's going on? those who will inevitably fail are still trying to go to college because of the value? seems unlikely. more fundamental problem with education.

But among students who had those same lofty academic credentials but didn’t have parents who had attended college themselves, only a third chose to go to a highly selective school. And choosing a less challenging college didn’t make it more likely that those highly qualified students would graduate—it had the opposite effect. Undermatching, the authors found, was almost always a big mistake.

students from disadvantaged background (here, parents did not attend college) went to less competitive schools than their high school achievements entitled them to…and then underperformed and dropped out. "undermatching"

The far better predictor of college completion was a student’s high-school GPA.

high school gpa better predictor than standardized tests: grit? working toward a goal is what matters? for me, standardized test was a goal in itself, studied and practiced a lot.

But consider Elizabeth Spiegel’s ability to reconstruct the thinking skills of her middle-school chess players. Think of the way Lanita Reed helped Keitha Jones change her whole outlook on life—essentially helping her rewire her personality—at the advanced age of seventeen. In each case, a teacher or mentor found a way to help a student achieve a rapid and unexpected transformation by using what James Heckman would call noncognitive skills and David Levin would call character strengths.

spiegel was spending crazy hours doing this and still feel that a large portion of the motivation was coming from her perhaps more than the students themselves. would they thrive on their own in college? so doesn't necessarily mean it's teachable in adolescents.

For a while, Roderick wrote, this formula worked well. “High school teachers could have very high workloads and manage them effectively because they expected most of their students to do little work,” she recounted. “Most students could get what they and their parents wanted, the high school credential, with little effort.” There was, she wrote, “an unwritten contract between students and teachers that said, ‘Put up with high school, do your seat time, and behave properly, and you will be rewarded.’”

is this why college grad rate falling? lowering expectations of high school performance so they're even worse prepared and allowed into college anyway? really a failure in high school education?

Those numbers grow more significant when you recall that OneGoal teachers are deliberately selecting struggling students who seem especially unlikely to go to college.

wait i thought they picked the struggling students who showed ambition…so if hypothesis is correct they picked the students with greatest potential for college success, among those with biggest disadvantages

Not long after the article was published, and while I was immersed in the research on college persistence, I found myself wondering anew about my decision to drop out. Why had I done it? I

dont really care much frankly. this feels like padding

I had a rebellious streak—I was a teenage Kerouac reader—and

reading kerouac as teenager is rebellious? perhaps at one point, but not for quite a while…

And believe me, if decades after you drop out of college, you’re still trying to justify your decision, there’s nothing more reassuring than finding out that one of the most successful and creative businessmen of modern times did the same thing. And what’s more, that he had no regrets.

always dislike people bringing this up. best possible example of survivor bias. lets look at dropouts as a whole population. how do they fare? is it a good decision? by far, for most, no.

The consensus of most reform advocates is that there are far too many underperforming teachers, especially in high-poverty schools, and the only way to improve outcomes for students in these schools is to change the way teachers are hired, trained, compensated, and fired.

and i think this is the really hard part