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

by Paul Tough

What matters most in a child’s development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character.

scientists have reached a consensus in the past decade that the key channel through which early adversity causes damage to developing bodies and brains is stress.

The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments, and harder to follow directions.

For many other young people, though, the main effect of stress is that it compromises their ability to regulate their thoughts.

When they used statistical techniques to factor out the effect of allostatic load, the poverty effect disappeared completely. It wasn’t poverty itself that was compromising the executive-function abilities of the poor kids. It was the stress that went along with it.

the more significant disadvantage the low-income boy faces is in fact his elevated allostatic load.

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.

Parents and other caregivers who are able to form close, nurturing relationships with their children can foster resilience in them that protects them from many of the worst effects of a harsh early environment. This message can sound a bit warm and fuzzy, but it is rooted in cold, hard science. The effect of good parenting is not just emotional or psychological, the neuroscientists say; it is biochemical.

High-quality mothering, in other words, can act as a powerful buffer against the damage that adversity inflicts on a child’s stress-response system,

The dominant advice to parents in the 1950s, based on behavioral theory, was to avoid “spoiling” infants by picking them up or otherwise comforting them when they cried.

In a series of studies in the 1960s and early 1970s, Ainsworth showed that the effect of early nurturance was exactly the opposite of what the behaviorists expected. Babies whose parents responded readily and fully to their cries in the first months of life were, at one year, more independent and intrepid than babies whose parents had ignored their cries. In preschool, the pattern continued—the children whose parents had responded most sensitively to their emotional needs as infants were the most self-reliant. Warm, sensitive parental care, Ainsworth and Bowlby contended, created a “secure base” from which a child could explore the world.

Parents who were attuned to their child’s mood and responsive to his cues produced securely attached children; parenting that was detached or conflicted or hostile produced anxiously attached children. And early attachment, Ainsworth said, created psychological effects that could last a lifetime.

Attachment classification, the Minnesota researchers found, was not absolute destiny—sometimes attachment relationships changed in the course of childhood,

who had had secure attachment in infancy as more self-confident, more curious, and better able to deal with setbacks.

research from the Minnesota study and elsewhere shows that if a new mother experienced insecure attachment with her parents as a child (no matter what her class background), then it will be exponentially more difficult for her to provide a secure, nurturing environment for her own children.

Pessimists, Seligman wrote, tend to react to negative events by explaining them as permanent, personal, and pervasive. (Seligman calls these “the three P’s.”)

Optimists, by contrast, look for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and as a result, in the face of a setback, they’re more likely to pick themselves up and try again.

People who have an easy time of things, who get eight hundreds on their SATs, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure.

Seligman and Peterson defined character in a different way: a set of abilities or strengths that are very much changeable—entirely malleable, in fact. They are skills you can learn; they are skills you can practice; and they are skills you can teach.

“The problem, I think, is not only the schools but also the students themselves,” she wrote. “Here’s why: learning is hard. True, learning is fun, exhilarating and gratifying—but it is also often daunting, exhausting and sometimes discouraging. . . . To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect.”

Angela Duckworth

she found that the students’ self-discipline scores from the previous fall were better predictors of their final GPAs than their IQ scores.

marshmallow test.

In recent years, the Harvard economist Roland Fryer has essentially tried to extend the M&M experiment to the scale of a metropolitan school system. He tested several different incentive programs in public schools—offering bonuses to teachers if they improved their classes’ test results; offering incentives like cell-phone minutes to students if they improved their own test results; offering families financial incentives if their children did better. The experiments were painstaking and carefully run—and the results have been almost uniformly disappointing.

This is the problem with trying to motivate people: No one really knows how to do it well.

And what the labor market does value is the kind of internal motivation required to try hard on a test even when there is no external reward for doing well.

kids who exerted themselves whether or not there was a potential reward? Well, here’s the technical term that personality psychologists use: conscientiousness.

People high in conscientiousness get better grades in high school and college; they commit fewer crimes; and they stay married longer. They live longer—and not just because they smoke and drink less. They have fewer strokes, lower blood pressure, and a lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. “It

In 2008, a national organization called the Character Education Partnership published a paper that divided character education into two categories: programs that develop “moral character,” which embodies ethical values like fairness, generosity, and integrity; and those that address “performance character,” which includes values like effort, diligence, and perseverance.

Wealthy parents today, she argues, are more likely than others to be emotionally distant from their children while at the same time insisting on high levels of achievement, a potentially toxic blend of influences that can create “intense feelings of shame and hopelessness” in affluent children.

Madeline Levine

Luthar polled students on their relationships with their parents. She found that parenting mattered at both socioeconomic extremes. For both rich and poor teenagers, certain family characteristics predicted children’s maladjustment, including low levels of maternal attachment, high levels of parental criticism, and minimal afterschool adult supervision.

parents at Riverdale, while pushing their children to excel, inadvertently shield them from exactly the kind of experience that can lead to character growth.

we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we know—on some level, at least—that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can.

What Riverdale offers parents, above all else, is a high probability of nonfailure.

the best way for a young person to build character is for him to attempt something where there is a real and serious possibility of failure.

Randolph wants his students to succeed, of course—it’s just that he believes that in order for them to do so, they first need to learn how to fail.

Infinity’s “compliance-based” system “models an atmosphere of punitive dependence,” Brunzell wrote, “which ultimately negates student decision-making.” As a result, he noted, KIPP Infinity students often demonstrated the shallowest kind of good conduct—not contemplating in a deep way the consequences of their actions but ostentatiously behaving well when teachers were watching and then trying to get away with as much as possible as soon as the teachers’ backs were turned.

“We had kids who were doing the right thing for the wrong reasons,”

Just as a strong will doesn’t help much if a student isn’t motivated to succeed, so motivation alone is insufficient without the volitional fortitude to follow through on goals.

When I go into a lot of schools, I see posters that say ‘Dream it and you can achieve it!’ But we need to get away from positive fantasizing about how we’re all going to grow up to be rich and famous, and start thinking about the obstacles that now stand in the way of getting to where we want to be.”

the traits we call virtues are no more and no less than simple habits. “Habit and character are essentially the same thing,” Duckworth explained

But a psychologist at Stanford named Carol Dweck has discovered a remarkable thing: Regardless of the facts on the malleability of intelligence , students do much better academically if they believe intelligence is malleable.

Two of the most important executive functions are cognitive flexibility and cognitive self-control. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to see alternative solutions to problems, to think outside the box, to negotiate unfamiliar situations. Cognitive self-control is the ability to inhibit an instinctive or habitual response and substitute a more effective, less obvious one.

“Teaching chess is really about teaching the habits that go along with thinking,” Spiegel explained to me one morning when I visited her classroom. “Like how to understand your mistakes and how to be more aware of your thought processes.”

losing is something you do, not something you are.”

Researchers, including Michael Meaney and Clancy Blair, have demonstrated that for infants to develop qualities like perseverance and focus, they need a high level of warmth and nurturance from their caregivers.

Perhaps what pushes middle-school students to concentrate and practice as maniacally as Spiegel’s chess players do is the unexpected experience of someone taking them seriously, believing in their abilities, and challenging them to improve themselves.

When his students were flailing, lost in moments of stress and emotional turmoil, he would encourage them to do the kind of big-picture thinking—the metacognition, as many psychologists call it—that takes place in the prefrontal cortex: slowing down, examining their impulses, and considering more productive solutions to their problems than, say, yelling at a teacher or shoving another kid on the playground.

“A lot of people with attention issues crave intense experiences and serious stimulation,” he explained. “They want to be absorbed in some sort of all-encompassing pursuit.”

you will “reveal your choice through your behavior and your determination. Every action says, ‘This is who I am.’”

tendency toward confirmation bias: It feels much better to find evidence that confirms what you believe to be true than to find evidence that falsifies what you believe to be true.