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

by Paul Tough

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.

Robert Sapolsky explains that our stress-response system, like that of all mammals, evolved to react to brief and acute stresses. That worked well when humans were out on the savanna running from predators. But modern humans rarely have to contend with lion attacks. Instead, most of our stress today comes from mental processes: from worrying about things. And the HPA axis isn’t designed to handle that kind of stress.

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

allostatic load, to produce a single number for each individual that would express the damage that a lifetime of stress management had imposed.

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.

Keeping track of those various tricks and exceptions requires a certain amount of cognitive impulse control, and that is a skill that is neurologically related to emotional impulse control—your ability to refrain from punching the kid who just grabbed your favorite toy car. In both the Stroop test and the toy-car incident, you’re using the prefrontal cortex to overcome your immediate and instinctive reaction.

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.

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. 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, much as the dams’ licking and grooming seemed to protect their pups.

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.

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.

Learned Optimism, a book by Martin Seligman,

“The thing that I think is great about the character-strength approach is that it is fundamentally devoid of value judgment,” he told me. “The inevitable problem with the values-and-ethics approach is you get into, well, Whose values? Whose ethics?”

For instance, both 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 than when the marshmallows were right in front of them. The children who did best at the delay test created their own distractions. Some talked or sang to themselves while they waited for the experimenter to return; some looked away from the treat or put their hands over their eyes. One young master of self-control actually managed to take a nap.

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.

few years later, two researchers from the University of South Florida elaborated on Edlund’s experiment. This time, after the first, candy-less IQ test, they divided the children into three groups according to their scores on the first test. The high-IQ group had an average IQ score on the first test of about 119. The medium-IQ group averaged about 101, and the low-IQ group averaged about 79. On the second test, the researchers offered half the children in each IQ category an M&M for each right answer, just as Edlund had; the others in each group received no reward. The medium-IQ and high-IQ kids who got candy didn’t improve their scores at all on the second test. But the low-IQ children who were given M&M’s for each correct answer raised their IQ scores to about 97, almost erasing the gap with the medium-IQ group. The M&M studies were a major blow to the conventional wisdom about intelligence, which held that IQ tests measured something real and permanent—something that couldn’t be changed drastically with a few candy-covered chocolates. They also raised an important and puzzling question about the supposedly low-IQ children: Did they actually have low IQs or not? Which number was the true measure of their intelligence: 79 or 97?

the test takers’ inclination and ability to force themselves to care about the world’s most boring test. The recruits, who had more at stake, put more effort into the coding test than the NLSY kids did, and on such a simple test, that extra level of exertion was enough for them to beat out their more-educated peers.

the low-stakes, low-reward test that predicts how well someone is going to do in

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.

she found the affluent teenagers used alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, and harder illegal drugs more than the low-income teens. Thirty-five percent of the suburban girls had tried all four substances, compared with just 15 percent of the inner-city girls. The wealthy girls in Luthar’s survey also suffered from elevated rates of depression; 22 percent of them reported clinically significant symptoms.

Overindulging kids, with the intention of giving them everything and being loving, but at the expense of their character—that’s huge in our population. I think that’s one of the biggest problems we have

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. In a high-risk endeavor, whether it’s in business or athletics or the arts, you are more likely to experience colossal defeat than in a low-risk one—but you’re also more likely to achieve real and original success.

Dweck’s notion that students do better when they think they can improve their intelligence applies to character as well. At least, that is the idea behind the character report card—that presenting character to students not as a set of fixed traits but as a series of constantly developing attributes will inspire them to improve those traits.

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.

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.

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.

is crucial to distinguish between ‘wanting’ something and ‘choosing’ it.”

(For American women, the increase in the college-graduation rate was fairly modest until the early 1960s, but after that, it far outpaced the increase among men.)

“Each generation of Americans achieved a level of education that greatly exceeded that of the previous one.” 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.

the United States does not so much have a problem of limited and unequal college access; it has a problem of limited and unequal college completion. Among the thirty-four member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, or OECD, the United States still ranks a respectable eighth in its college-enrollment rate. But in college completion—the percentage of entering college freshmen who go on to graduate—the United States ranks second to last, ahead of only Italy. Not long ago, the United States led the world in producing college graduates; now it leads the world in producing college dropouts.

High-school guidance counselors and college-admissions officers, lost in “a fog of wishful thinking, euphemisms, and well-intentioned egalitarianism,” encourage low-IQ, low-income students to attend colleges that are too intellectually demanding; when those students discover that they don’t possess the intelligence necessary to do the work, they drop out. Murray, the coauthor of The Bell Curve, is perhaps the country’s best-known cognitive determinist, and his thesis in Real Education is a pure expression of the cognitive hypothesis: what matters in success is IQ, which is fixed quite early in life; education is not so much about providing skills as it is about sorting people and giving those with the highest IQs the opportunity to reach their full potential. But when Bowen, McPherson, and Chingos took a close look at their data, they found that low-income students generally weren’t overreaching their abilities when they chose their colleges; many of them, in fact, were attending schools well below what their GPAs and standardized-test scores qualified them for. This phenomenon, which the authors labeled undermatching, didn’t happen much with well-off students; it was a problem that almost exclusively affected disadvantaged teenagers. In North Carolina, the state for which the researchers were able to gather the most complete data, three out of four high-income students with the GPAs and test scores needed to gain admission to one of the state’s highly selective public col...

she found that standardized-test scores were predicted by scores on pure IQ tests and that GPA was predicted by scores on tests of self-control.

between 1980 and 2002, the percentage of American tenth-graders who said they wanted to obtain at least a BA doubled, from 40 percent to 80 percent.