How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character, by Paul Tough
Introduction
This book is about the tools kids need to succeed and how we can steer them toward success. The author proposes that we’re teaching kids the wrong skills and using incorrect strategies to help them meet their goals. The actual qualities kids need are optimism, resilience, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence.
Much of the book talks about programs that help underprivileged kids improve their grades, college acceptances and skill levels. He specifically compares and discusses the differences between the rich and poor. When he discusses setbacks or hardships, he’s generally referring to economic terms. Through these studies and programs, the author weaves in “lessons” on what is important to teach kids.
This book was an interesting read. That’s it. If you’re looking for a book that clearly spells out how to raise successful kids, I’d steer away from this book. It isn’t for those that want a clear instruction manual on how to lead their child to success. As mentioned above, the author intersperses his ideas while relating numerous experiences, programs, stories and studies. It is interesting and his points are generally good. However, there are better ways to learn this information.
Executive Function
The author speaks about a topic raised in every “Brain” book: Executive Function.
Executive functions are a collection of higher-order mental abilities. Broadly, they refer to the ability to deal with confusing and unpredictable situations and information. This requires a healthy dose of impulse control. For a child, it’s the ability to refrain from punching the kid who just grabbed his toy. Or, for a master chess player, it’s the ability to resist the temptation to pursue an immediately attractive move and, instead, think slowly through the next several steps.
Executive functions are much more malleable than other cognitive skills. The prefrontal cortex is more responsive to intervention than other parts of the brain, and it stays flexible through early adulthood. Conversely, IQ is resistant to improvement after about age 8. Improving a child’s environment can lead to better executive functioning, better handling of stress and big emotions and increased prospects for success.
Factors that Impact Success
Home Environment
Children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, sit still, rebound from disappointments, and follow directions—all things that affect school performance. It’s hard to learn when you’re overwhelmed and distracted by impulses and negative feelings.
Parents and caregivers who form close, nurturing relationships with their children can foster resilience that protects them from many of the worst effects of a tough early environment. Research shows that when mothers score high in responsiveness toward her child during stressful situations, the impact of those environmental factors almost seemed to disappear.
The impact of good parenting is emotional, psychological and biochemical. Early childhood brains and bodies are the most sensitive to the effects of stress and trauma but high-quality mothering can be a powerful buffer against the potential damage. Consistently good parenting, being helpful and attentive, can make a profound difference in a child’s future.
In addition to love and hugs, kids need discipline, rules, limits—someone to say “No.”
These types of ideas always bring up social media for me. While many parents try really hard and take their parenting role seriously, I find there are also parents who are less careful with their children. Kids are not adults; they process things differently. They don’t have the luxury of insight, world experience or therapists to help them get through difficulties. It’s just you. I find that many parents turn to social media when they feel they reacted “badly” toward their children. They often relay a story where either they feel guilty for something or because a stranger/ relative told them off about some sort of behavior they witnessed.
The response is always swift from others, “you’re doing a great job,” “you did the right thing,” etc., etc. I’m not sure if parents turn to these groups to get validation and feel better about themselves, or if they are genuinely looking for advice on how to improve.
In either case, I think we do children (and parents) such a disservice when we react this way. We generally don’t know these parents personally, we don’t know the situation or context within which this reaction occurred, so how can we react this way? What if they weren’t doing the right thing? What if they can improve? What if it was truly damaging to their child? Of course, parents aren’t perfect, and we all have our moments, but we need to be careful with how we react to these social media comments. Instead of giving hollow encouragement, we should give gentle feedback and tips on how to address the situation differently. Study after study shows how much early childhood experiences, specifically parental behaviors, impact children. It is so important we remember the kids before we respond reflexively.
Attachment
Warm, sensitive care creates a “secure base” from which a child can explore the world.
Scientists have demonstrated that the best way to produce an adult who is brave, curious, kind and prudent is to ensure that she’s protected from serious trauma and chronic stress when she’s an infant. Even more important is helping her form proper attachment with one (but ideally two) parent(s). This is a big part of future success.
For infants to develop qualities like perseverance, independence and focus, they need a high level of warmth and nurturing from their caregivers. They need parents who are attuned to their mood and responsive to their cues. Babies whose parents respond to their cries fully in the first months of life are, at a year old, more independent and curious than those whose parents ignored their cries. Early attachment creates psychological effects that could last a lifetime.
For most children, attachment status at one year of age was highly predictive of a wide range of outcomes later in life, including antisocial and immature behaviors and dropping out of high school.
If a mother experienced insecure attachment with her parents as a child, then it will be exponentially harder for her to provide a secure, nurturing environment for her children. However, parents can overcome histories of trauma and poor attachment.
How? How can parents overcome histories of trauma and poor attachment? The author never says.
This section demonstrates why I can’t fully recommend this book. It’s laden with interesting studies and facts, but it doesn’t go deep enough into how. It doesn’t tell parents how to instill the qualities and skills it’s espousing.
Optimism and a Growth Mindset
Students do much better academically if they believe intelligence is malleable. Pessimists tend to react to negative events by explaining them as permanent, personal, and pervasive. Optimists look for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and therefore are more likely to pick themselves up and try again.
Conversely, there are those who have a fixed mindset—they believe that intelligence and other skills are static and inborn, versus those who have a growth mindset, who believe that intelligence can be improved. They recover from bad grades, resist the urge to go out, resolve to do better and try harder. Students with a growth mindset actually improve their grades.
Character and, therefore, future success are malleable too. If children/students work hard, persevere and have a lot of grit, etc., they can enhance their grades and accomplishments.
For disadvantaged students, resilience is an indispensable factor in making it to graduation.
Self-control and willpower
In an experiment, children were placed in a room with a marshmallow. If they resisted eating the marshmallow until the proctor came back, they would receive an additional marshmallow. Years later, the children who had been able to wait for fifteen minutes for their treat had SAT scores that averaged 210 points higher than those children who couldn’t wait more than thirty seconds.
The children who did best in the experiment thought more abstractly about the treat. For example, they thought of the marshmallow as a puffy cloud instead of a delicious treat.
Ahhh, the Marshmallow Study…the study referenced in every brain book. I can understand why, though. The results were far different than the researchers imagined—they were absolutely fascinating and give us some great information! It makes sense that being able to control ones impulses and remain focused on a future goal is a key ingredient for success.
Based on research, the most accurate predictor of whether a student would complete college was her high school GPA, not her SAT/ACT score. High school grades reveal qualities of motivation, perseverance, self-control and willpower.
Conscientiousness
Achievement takesmotivation and volition. You can be extremely motivated, but you won’t succeed unless you have willpower and self-control. It isn’t just ability that matters, but how much you care and how hard you work.
Sometimes incentives work and sometimes they don’t. In some studies, incentives were shown to improve grade performance, but in others, incentives had no impact at all. Studies where incentives (like giving an m&m for each correct answer) impacted grades significantly, show it’s not just intelligence that matters; it’s also conscientiousness.
So, what makes someone conscientious? Self-control. They are also often compulsive, anxious and repressed.
Research in industrial/organizational psychology has found that conscientiousness was the trait that best predicted workplace success. People scoring high in conscientiousness get better grades in high school and college, commit fewer crimes, stay married longer, and live longer. It seems to be one of the primary qualities of success in life.
In a study, students who didn’t respond to material incentives—who did well whether or not they received a reward—achieved particularly high scores on conscientiousness.
For adolescents, what motivates them might be the unexpected experience of someone taking them seriously, believing in their abilities and challenging them to improve themselves.
Grit
Grit is the essential ingredient for innovators, creators and entrepreneurs. Grit is a headstrong commitment to a single goal and an unswerving dedication to achieve it. People with grit have a clear goal and work tirelessly and effectively toward that goal. Grit is a better predictor for success than IQ.
Quantifying Character
Failure is an option
Poor maternal attachment, high levels of parental criticism and pressure, and minimal adult supervision all affect a child’s ability to succeed.
On the flip side, what kids need more than anything is a little hardship or challenge that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can. The best way for a young person to build character is to attempt something where there is a high likelihood of failure. We learn self-control and develop grit through failure.
It’s important to teach children how to learn from each failure, how to examine them with brutal honesty and confront exactly why they messed up. Children need to take responsibility for their mistakes, examine why they made them and think hard about what they might have done differently. They need to learn from their mistakes without obsessing or berating themselves. Our current society is so over-protective of children that they aren’t developing the ability to overcome failure and learn from it.
Truer words have never been spoken. This book is mainly talking about children, but our society has gone so far down the path of protecting teenagers, college students and even adults from the slightest discomfort that we are not learning how to cope and thrive. It’s OK to be in an uncomfortable environment, it’s OK to fail and it’s OK to not get a trophy for everything (or at all). Children need to be able to deal with these things…so they turn into adults who can learn from adversity, figure out how to succeed and, most importantly, deal with life.
Good Habits
Character strengths that matter so much to success are not innate or a result of good luck or good genes. They are habits. Some kids have good habits and some kids have bad habits. Habits might be hard to change, but they can be changed.
Conscientious people have made it their default response to do the right thing; they don’t make a conscious decision about how to behave when approached with each new situation. Habits are also molded by the environment we grow up in. That means we can do an enormous amount to influence a child’s development.
If you lack the benefits of wealth or high intelligence, you need to compensate with more grit, more social intelligence, more self-control than the privileged kids.
Recap
So that’s the book and my thoughts in a nutshell. All these brain books are the same, saying we’re teaching children the wrong skills. With this book, however, there isn’t too much meat on the bones. The author never actually explicitly states what to do to raise successful children; he merely relates the principles, strategies and findings of different programs and studies and almost presents them as just things to think about. You kind of have to connect the dots and assume these are the principles he’s advocating for.
This book is a bestseller, either because the publisher had a great PR team or because people liked it. You can read it and decide, but don’t read it to get a blueprint for raising successful kids.
