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by
Paul Tough
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December 16 - December 25, 2018
Tools of the Mind, by contrast, doesn’t focus much on reading and math abilities. Instead, all of its interventions are intended to help children learn a different kind of skill: controlling their impulses, staying focused on the task at hand, avoiding distractions and mental traps, managing their emotions, organizing their thoughts.
Tools of the Mind students are taught a variety of strategies, tricks, and habits that they can deploy to keep their minds on track. They learn to use “private speech”: talking to themselves as they do a difficult task (like, say, forming the letter W), to help them remember what step comes next (down, up, down, up). They use “mediators”: physical objects that remind them how to complete a particular activity (for instance, the two cards, one with a pair of lips and one with an ear, that signify whose turn it is to read aloud in buddy reading and whose turn it is to listen). Every morning,
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a culture saturated with an idea you might call the cognitive hypothesis: the belief, rarely expressed aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills—the
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.
When they looked at patients with high ACE scores (7 or more) who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink to excess, and weren’t overweight, they found that their risk of ischemic heart disease (the single most common cause of death in the United States) was still 360 percent higher than those with an ACE score of 0. The adversity these patients had experienced in childhood was making them sick through a pathway that had nothing to do with behavior.
two fairly obscure medical fields: neuroendocrinology (the study of how hormones interact with the brain) and stress physiology (the study of how stress affects the body).
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.
We “activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies,” Sapolsky writes, “but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.” And over the past fifty years, scientists have discovered that this phenomenon is not merely inefficient but also highly destructive.
Overloading the HPA axis, especially in infancy and childhood, produces all kinds of serious and long-lasting negative effects—physical, psychological, and neurological.
The tricky thing about this process, though, is that it’s not actually the stress itself that messes us up. It is t...
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allostasis,
risks. A more accurate allostatic-load index would include not just blood pressure and heart rate but other stress-sensitive measures: levels of cholesterol and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (a leading marker for cardiovascular disease); readings of cortisol and other stress hormones in the urine and of glucose and insulin and lipids in the bloodstream.
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.
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 prefrontal cortex is more responsive to intervention than other parts of the brain, and it stays flexible well into adolescence and early adulthood. So if we can improve a child’s environment in the specific ways that lead to better executive functioning, we can increase his prospects for success in a particularly efficient way.
It turns out that there is a particularly effective antidote to the ill effects of early stress, and it comes not from pharmaceutical companies or early-childhood educators but from parents. 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.
what mattered was not the licking-and-grooming habits of the biological mother; it was the licking-and-grooming habits of the rearing mother.
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,
much as the dams’ licking and grooming seemed to protect their pups.
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.
Warm, sensitive parental care, Ainsworth and Bowlby contended, created a “secure base” from which a child could explore the world.
The early nurturing attention from their mothers had fostered in them a resilience that acted as a protective buffer against stress.
child-parent psychotherapy,
Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up,
ABC encourages foster parents to respond to their infants’ cues more attentively and warmly and calmly.
one of the most promising facts about programs that target emotional and psychological and neurological pathways is that they can be quite effective later on in childhood too—much more so than cognitive interventions.
executive functions and the ability to handle stress and manage strong emotions can be improved, sometimes dramatically, well into adolescence and even adulthood.
Pessimists, Seligman wrote, tend to react to negative events by explaining them as permanent, personal, and pervasive.
“This push on tests,” he told me when I visited his office one fall day, “is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”
Character Strengths and Virtues
twenty-four character strengths they believed to be universally respected. The list includes some qualities we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom, and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest, and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions, like social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, and gratitude.
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.
To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect.”
students’ self-discipline scores from the previous fall were better predictors of their final GPAs than their IQ scores.
psychoanalytic theory and behavioral theory had held that the best way for a child to motivate himself to wait and get two marshmallows was for him to keep the reward at the center of his attention, to reinforce how delicious those two marshmallows would be when he finally got to eat them. But in fact, the opposite turned out to be true: when the marshmallows were hidden from view, children were able to delay much longer
useful to divide the mechanics of achievement into two separate dimensions: motivation and volition. Each one, she says, is necessary to achieve long-term goals, but neither is sufficient alone.
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.
what do you call the quality exhibited by Segal’s go-getters, the kids who exerted themselves whether or not there was a potential reward? Well, here’s the technical term that personality psychologists use: conscientiousness.
the most effective way to analyze the human personality is to consider it along five dimensions, known as the Big Five: agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, and conscientiousness.
not: a passionate commitment to a single mission and an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word grit.
grit self-control zest social intelligence gratitude optimism curiosity
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.
students do much better academically if they believe intelligence is malleable. Dweck divides people into two types: those who have a fixed mindset, who believe that intelligence and other skills are essentially static and inborn, and those who have a growth mindset, who believe that intelligence can be improved.
the most important talents in chess are not intellectual at all; they are psychological and emotional.
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.
for infants to develop qualities like perseverance and focus, they need a high level of warmth and nurturance from their caregivers. What Spiegel’s success suggests, though, is that when children reach early adolescence, what motivates them most effectively isn’t licking and grooming–style care but a very different kind of attention. 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.
students were being challenged to look deeply at their own mistakes, examine why they had made them, and think hard about what they might have done differently. And whether you call that approach cognitive therapy or just plain good teaching, it seemed remarkably effective in producing change in middle-school students.
If you believe that your school’s mission or your job as a teacher is simply to convey information, then it probably doesn’t seem necessary to subject your students to that kind of rigorous self-analysis. But if you’re trying to help them change their character, then conveying information isn’t enough.
“When it comes to ambition,” Rowson wrote, “it is crucial to distinguish between ‘wanting’ something and ‘choosing’ it.”
Was it better to spend your childhood, or your life, a little bit interested in a lot of things (as I tend to be), or a lot interested in one thing?
