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

by Paul Tough

Those traits—an inclination to persist at a boring and often unrewarding task; the ability to delay gratification; the tendency to follow through on a plan—also turned out to be valuable in college,

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.

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.

The researchers ran test after test, and on each one, the high-LG offspring excelled: They were better at mazes. They were more social. They were more curious. They were less aggressive. They had more self-control. They were healthier. They lived longer.

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.

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.

Children with secure attachment early on were more socially competent throughout their lives: better able to engage with preschool peers, better able to form close friendships in middle childhood, better able to negotiate the complex dynamics of adolescent social

And those behaviors—licking and grooming in the rats, responding sensitively to infants’ cues in the humans—seem to have had a powerful and long-lasting effect on the children’s outcomes in a variety of similar ways: the human and rat babies who received the extra dose of early care were, later on, more curious, more self-reliant, calmer, and better able to deal with obstacles. The early nurturing attention from their mothers had fostered in them a resilience that acted as a protective buffer against stress.

the principle behind it—improving children’s outcomes by promoting stronger relationships between children and their parents—is increasingly in use across the country in a wide variety of interventions. And the results, when these interventions are evaluated, are often powerful.

Attachment-promoting parenting, Cicchetti had shown, can be nurtured in even the most troubled parents, and the benefit to both them and their children can be profound.

Unlike a subpar vocabulary, anxiety-producing parenting can be undone with a relatively minor intervention. Which means that the cycle of poor attachment can be broken for good.

If Anita Stewart-Montgomery is able to help Jacqui and Makayla form a secure attachment bond, then Makayla will not just be more likely to be a happy child. She will also be more likely to graduate from high school, to stay out of jail, to delay pregnancy, and to have a more positive relationship with her own children.

A giant sign in the stairwell reminded the students of their mission: climb the mountain to college.

The way Vance sees it today, KIPP set him up for high school very well academically, but it didn’t prepare him emotionally or psychologically.

looking back, he has regrets too. “I had a lot of potential,” he told me, “and I probably should have done more with it.”

The students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP. Instead, they seemed to be the ones who possessed certain other gifts, skills like optimism and resilience and social agility.

They were the students who were able to recover from bad grades and resolve to do better next time;

who could persuade professors to give them extra ...

The qualities that Levin was noticing in his college graduates overlapped considerably with the set of abilities that James Heckman and other economists had identified as noncognitive skills.

If you want to avoid depression and improve your life, Seligman counseled, you need to refashion your “explanatory style,” to create for yourself a better story about why good and bad things happen to you.

Cultivating these strengths represented a reliable path to “the good life,” a life that was not just happy but meaningful and fulfilling.

Duckworth felt that Levin, who was about her age, possessed some trait that she did 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.

To succeed, you need more grit, more social intelligence, more self-control than wealthier kids.

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.

The game “is a celebration of existential freedom, in the sense that we are blessed with the opportunity to create ourselves through our actions. In choosing to play chess, we are celebrating freedom above utility.”

this state of intense concentration: flow. He wrote that flow moments most often occur “when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile.”

You simply don’t experience flow if you aren’t good at something—I will never feel it at the chessboard.

in 1946, a Dutch psychologist named Adriaan de Groot picked up on Binet’s research and began testing the mental abilities of a collection of chess masters, and his results challenged another long-held belief about chess skill. It had always been assumed that an essential element of chess mastery was rapid calculation; that on each move, the best chess players were able to consider many more possible outcomes than novices were.

the instincts to know intuitively which potential moves to take seriously; they never even considered the less promising options.

But if the best chess players don’t have better visual memories, and they don’t analyze potential outcomes more quickly, what does set them apart from novices? The answer may have more to do with their ability to perform one particular mental task that relies as much on psychological strengths as on cognitive ability: a task known as falsification.

When testing a theory, however large or small, an individual doesn’t instinctively look for evidence that contradicts it; he looks for data that prove him right, a tendency known as confirmation bias. That tendency and the ability to overcome it turn out to be crucial elements in chess success.

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.

And he seemed to be a case study in grit: he had a clear goal that he felt passionately about, and he worked hard and tirelessly and effectively toward that goal. (I have never met a twelve-year-old who worked harder at anything.) And yet he was, according to the standard predictors of academic success, below average, destined for a mediocre future at best.

But it’s also possible to see in James a less inspiring story, a tale of unfulfilled potential.

What if he had expended the same energy and received the same help learning math and reading and generalized knowledge as he did with chess? And what if he had worked in every subject with teachers as creative and engaged as Spiegel and Prilleltensky? I have no doubt that he would have conquered the specialized-school exam the same way he conquered the junior high nationals.

For a student with his prodigious gifts, anything seems possible—as long as there’s a teacher out there who can make succeeding in school as attractive a prospect as succeeding on the chessboard.

and just in the past decade or so, the United States has fallen from first to twelfth in the percentage of its twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds who are graduates of four-year colleges, trailing behind a diverse list of competitors that includes the United Kingdom, Australia, Poland, Norway, and South Korea.

It is not that the overall college-attainment rate in the United States has gone down—it has just been growing very slowly, while the rates of other nations have raced ahead.

In 1976, 24 percent of Americans in their late twenties had earned a four-year college degree; thirty years later, in 2006, the figure had risen to only 28 percent. But that apparen...

Between 1990 and 2000, the rate of BA attainment among wealthy students with at least one parent who had graduated from college rose from 61 percent to 68 percent, while, according to one analysis, the rate among the most disadvantaged young Americans—students in the lowest-income quartile whose pare...

In this era of rising inequality, that trend might seem unsurprising: just one more indicator of the way the classes are diverging in the United States. But it’s worth remembering that for m...

As the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz chronicled in their influential 2008 book The Race Between Education and Technology, the story of American higher education in the twentie...

As a result, American college campuses became less elite and more diverse;

But now that progress has stopped, or at least stalled, and the nation’s higher-education system has ceased to be the instrument of social mobility and growing equality that it was for so much of the twentieth century.

Not long ago, the United States led the world in producing college graduates; now it leads the world in producing college dropouts.

What he wasn’t able to see at the time, Jobs said, but that became clear later was that the experience of such a dramatic failure allowed him to reorient himself and his work in a way that led to his greatest successes:

the most profound discovery this new generation of neuroscientists has made is the powerful connection between infant brain chemistry and adult psychology.

if we really want him to succeed, we need to first let him fail. Or more precisely, we need to help him learn to manage failure. This idea—the importance of learning how to deal with and learn from your own failures—is a common thread in many of the chapters in this book.

As she saw it, her job was not to prevent them from failing; it was to teach them how to learn from each failure, how to stare at their failures with unblinking honesty, how to confront exactly why they had messed up.