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

by Paul Tough

1990s with Robe...

seventeen thousand patients completed and returned the questionnaires—a

tabulated

they were surprised, first, by the sheer prevalence of childhood trauma among this generally well-off population. More than a quarter of the patients said they had grown up in a household with an alcoholic or a drug user; about the same fraction had been beaten as children. When the doctors used the data to assign each patient an ACE score, giving them one point for each category of trauma they had experienced, they found that two-thirds of the patients had experienced at least one ACE, and one in eight had an ACE score of 4 or more.

voluminous

The correlations between adverse childhood experiences and negative adult outcomes were so powerful that they “stunned us,”

linear dose-response model: the higher the ACE score, the worse the outcome on almost every measure from addict...

obesity, depression, early sexual activity, history of smoking,

people with ACE scores of 4 or higher were twice as likely to smoke, seven times more likely to be alcoholics, and seven times more likely to have had sex before age fifteen. They were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with cancer, twice as likely to have heart disease, twice as likely to have liver disease, four times as likely to suffer from emphysema or chronic bronchitis. On some charts, the slopes were especially steep: adults with an ACE score above 6 were thirty times more likely to have attempted suicide than those with an ACE score of 0. And men with an ACE score above 5 were forty-six times more likely to have injected drugs than men with no history of ACEs.

intuitive

it was reasonable to assume that those feelings could lead to addiction, depression, and even suicide.

But Felitti and Anda found that ACEs had a profound negative effect on adult health even when those behaviors weren’t present. 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.

neuroendocrinology

stress physiology

consensus

the key channel through which early adversity causes damage to developing bodies and brains is stress.

HPA ...

“hypothalamic-pituitary...

ca...

pituitary

adrenal glands

stress ho...

glucocort...

fear and anxiety,

neurotransmitters activate, glucose levels rise, the cardiovascular system sends blood to the muscles, and inflammatory proteins surge through the bloodstream.

Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,

Robert Sa...

And the HPA axis isn’t designed to handle that kind of stress.

acute physical emergencies,”

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

Bruce McEwen,

allostasis,

allostatic load,

subtlety

But the HPA axis can’t distinguish between different types of threat, so it activates every defense, all at once, in response to any threat.

For Book - Gene therapy can change this? Better future?

Unfortunately, this means you often experience stress responses that are not at all helpful—like when you need to speak before an audience, and suddenly your mouth goes dry. Your HPA axis, sensing danger, is conserving fluids, preparing to ward off an attack. And you’re standing there looking for a glass of water and swallowing hard.

This may be the right strategy for saving lives in fires, but it can also result in a dozen trucks pulling up to put out a single smoldering trash can—or worse, responding to a false alarm.

abandoned just a few days after she was born by her mother,

ricocheting

enumerated

Teresa Seeman,

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

blood pressure meas...

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.

frightening one: a single number that a doctor could give you in, say, your early twenties that would reflect both the stress you had experienced in life to that point and the medical risks that you now faced as a result of that stress. In some ways it would be a more refined version of your ACE score. But unlike your ACE score, which relies on your own report of your childhood, your allostatic-load number would reflect nothing but cold, hard medical data: the actual physical effects of childhood adversity, written on your body, deep under your skin.

James Heckman to Angela Duckworth to Melissa Roderick to the authors of Crossing the Finish Line—have

low grit, low perseverance, bad planning skills.

not being given enough genuine opportunities to overcome adversity and thus develop their character.

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

never developed the grit that came from confronting real challenges.