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

by Paul Tough

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.

the cognitive hypothesis: the belief, rarely expressed aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills—the

evidence linking the academic underperformance of poor children to a lack of verbal and mathematical stimulation at home and at school.

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,

In the long run, it seemed, as a way to improve your life, the GED was essentially worthless.

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

GED holders, he wrote, “are ‘wise guys’ who lack the ability to think ahead, persist in tasks, or to adapt to their environments.”

noncognitive factors, such as curiosity, self-control, and social fluidity, were responsible for as much as two-thirds of the total benefit that Perry gave its students.

Our bodies regulate stress using a system called the HPA axis. HPA stands for “hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal,”

Overloading the HPA axis, especially in infancy and childhood, produces all kinds of serious and long-lasting negative effects—physical, psychological, and neurological.

When you’re overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses and distracted by negative feelings, it’s hard to learn the alphabet.

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.

life is filled with tasks where working memory is crucial to success.

It is in early childhood that our brains and bodies are most sensitive to the effects of stress and trauma. But it is in adolescence that the damage that stress inflicts on us can lead to the most serious and long-lasting problems.

When does the innocent boy become the culpable man?

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.

The effect of good parenting is not just emotional or psychological, the neuroscientists say; it is biochemical.

able to establish which part of a pup’s genome got “switched on” by licking and grooming, and it turned out to be the precise segment that controlled the way the rat’s hippocampus would process stress hormones in adulthood.

in rats at least, subtle parental behaviors had predictable and long-lasting DNA-related effects that could actually be traced and observed.

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.

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.

Learned Optimism, a book by Martin Seligman,

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.

it is the kind of place members of the establishment send their kids so they can learn to be members of the establishment.

“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.”

twenty-four character strengths they believed to be universally respected.

Virtues,” they wrote, “are much more interesting than laws.”

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

Children who had been able to wait for fifteen minutes for their treat had SAT scores that were, on average, 210 points higher than those of children who had rung the bell after thirty seconds.

when the marshmallows were hidden from view, children were able to delay much longer than when the marshmallows were right in front of them. The children who did best at the delay test created their own distractions.

The problem with self-control techniques like the ones that the most disciplined marshmallow resisters employed is that they work only when a child knows what he or she wants.

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

Over the past couple of decades, a consensus has emerged among personality psychologists that 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.

Corporate America’s rulers wanted to staff their offices with bland and reliable sheep, so they created a school system that selected for those traits.

Overcontrolled people are “excessively constrained,” Block and two colleagues wrote in one paper. They “have difficulty making decisions [and] may unnecessarily delay gratification or deny themselves pleasure.”

grit self-control zest social intelligence gratitude optimism curiosity

“Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering. They don’t have a threshold for it. They’re protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents.

Traditionally, the purpose of a school like Riverdale is not to raise the ceiling on a child’s potential achievement in life but to raise the floor, to give him the kinds of connections and credentials that will make it very hard for him ever to fall out of the upper class.

“The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”

code-switching, the ability, highly prized at KIPP and at many other low-income urban schools, to recognize and accurately perform the behaviors appropriate to each different cultural setting.

if you’re in a museum or a college interview or a nice restaurant, you need to know exactly how to act or you’re going to miss out on important opportunities.

“At KIPP, we are teaching the professional code of behavior, the college code of behavior, the cultural-dominant code of behavior,” Brunzell said, “and we h...

“All kids this age are having mini-implosions every day,” he said. “I mean, it’s middle school, the worst years of their lives. But the kids who make it are the ones who can tell themselves, ‘I can rise above this little situation. I’m okay. Tomorrow is a new day.’”

When you’re making rules for yourself, Kessler writes, you’re enlisting the prefrontal cortex as your partner against the more reflexive, appetite-driven parts of your brain.

Rules, Kessler explains, “provide structure, preparing us for encounters with tempting stimuli and redirecting our attention elsewhere.”

the purest kind of intelligence is not very malleable at all.

Regardless of the facts on the malleability of intelligence, students do much better academically if they believe intelligence is malleable.

character: It can function as a substitute for the social safety net

Rowson has argued that 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.