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

by Paul Tough

  And if you’re one of the more than seven million American children growing up in a family earning less than $11,000 a year, you are confronted with countless obstacles to school success that children in families earning $41,000 a year likely are not. There are the straightforward financial considerations—your family probably can’t afford adequate shelter or nutritious food, let alone new clothes or books or educational toys. But the most serious obstacles to learning that you face most likely transcend what your family can or cannot buy. If your family makes that little money, there is almost certainly no adult in your home who is employed full-time. That may simply be because jobs are scarce, but it also may be because your parent or parents have other obstacles to employment, such as disability, depression, or substance abuse. Statistically, you are likely being raised by a poorly educated, never-married single mother. There’s also a good chance statistically that your caregiver has been reported to a child-welfare agency because of a suspicion of abuse or neglect.

  We know from the neuroscientists and the psychologists that students growing up in these homes are more likely to have high ACE scores and less likely to have the kinds of secure attachment relationships with caregivers that buffer the effects of stress and trauma; this in turn means they likely have below-average executive-function skills and difficulty handling stressful situations. In the classroom, they are hampered by poor concentration, impaired social skills, an inability to sit still and follow directions, and what teachers perceive as misbehavior.

  Despite these children’s intense needs, school reformers have not been very successful at creating interventions that work for them; they have done much better at creating interventions that work for children from better-off low-income families, those making $41,000 a year. No one has found a reliable way to help deeply disadvantaged children, in fact. Instead, what we have created is a disjointed, ad hoc system of government agencies and programs that follow them haphazardly through their childhood and adolescence.

  This dysfunctional pipeline starts in overcrowded Medicaid clinics and continues through social-service and child-welfare offices and hospital emergency rooms. Once students get to school, the system steers them into special education, remedial classes, and alternative schools, and then, for teenagers, there are GED programs and computer-assisted credit-recovery courses that too often allow them to graduate from high school without decent skills. Outside of school, the system includes foster homes, juvenile detention centers, and probation officers.

  Few of the agencies in this system are particularly well run or well staffed (there is no Teach for America equivalent sending in waves of eager and idealistic young college graduates to work in them), and their efforts are rarely well coordinated. For the children and families involved, dealing with these agencies tends to be frustrating and alienating and often humiliating. The system as a whole is extremely expensive and wildly inefficient, and it has a very low rate of success; almost no one who passes through it as a child graduates from college or achieves any of the other markers of a happy and successful life: a good career, an intact family, a stable home.

  But we could design an entirely different system for children who are dealing with deep and pervasive adversity at home. It might start at a comprehensive pediatric wellness center, like the one that Nadine Burke Harris is now working to construct in Bayview−Hunters Point, with trauma-focused care and social-service support woven into every medical visit. It might continue with parenting interventions that increase the chance of secure attachment, like Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up, or ABC, the program developed at the University of Delaware. In prekindergarten, it might involve a program like Tools of the Mind that promotes executive-function skills and self-regulation in young children. We’d want to make sure these students were in good schools, of course, not ones that track them into remedial classes but ones that challenge them to do high-level work. And whatever academic help they were getting in the classroom would need to be supplemented by social and psychological and character-building interventions outside the classroom, like the ones Elizabeth Dozier has brought to Fenger or the ones that a group called Turnaround for Children provides in several low-income schools in New York City and Washington, D.C. In high school, these students would benefit from some combination of what both OneGoal and KIPP Through College provide—a program that directs them toward higher education and tries to prepare them for college not only academically but also emotionally and psychologically.

  A coordinated system like that, targeted at the 10 to 15 percent of students at the highest risk of failure, would be expensive, there’s no doubt. But it would almost certainly be cheaper than the ad hoc system we have in place now. It would save not only lives but money, and not just in the long run, but right away.

  5. The Politics of Disadvantage

  Talking about the influence of family on the success and failure of poor children can be an uncomfortable proposition. Education reformers prefer to locate the main obstacles to success within the school system, and they take it as an article of faith that the solutions to those obstacles can be found in the classroom as well. Reform skeptics, by contrast, often blame out-of-school factors for the underperformance of low-income children, but when they list those factors—and I’ve read a lot of these lists—they tend to choose ones that don’t have much to do with family functioning. Instead, they identify largely impersonal influences like toxins in the environment, food insecurity, inadequate health care and housing, and racial discrimination. All of those problems are genuine and important. But they don’t accurately represent the biggest obstacles to academic success that poor children, especially very poor children, often face: a home and a community that create high levels of stress, and the absence of a secure relationship with a caregiver that would allow a child to manage that stress.

  So when we’re looking for root causes of poverty-related underachievement, why do we tend to focus on the wrong culprits and ignore the ones that science tells us do the most damage? I think there are three reasons. The first is that the science itself is not well known or well understood, and part of why it’s not well understood is that it is dense and hard to penetrate. Any time you need to use the term hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal in order to make your point, you’ve got trouble.

  Second, those of us who don’t live in low-income homes are understandably uneasy talking about family dysfunction in those homes. It’s rude to discuss other people’s parenting practices in a critical way in public. It’s especially rude when you’re talking about parents who don’t have the material advantages that you do. And when the person making the comments is white and the parents in question are black, everyone’s anxiety level increases. This is a conversation that inevitably unearths painful issues in American politics and the American psyche.

  Finally, there is the fact that the new science of adversity, in all its complexity, presents a real challenge to some deeply held political beliefs on both the left and the right. To liberals, the science is saying that conservatives are correct on one very important point: character matters. There is no antipoverty tool we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable than the character strengths that Keitha Jones and Kewauna Lerma and James Black possess in such impressive quantities: conscientiousness, grit, resilience, perseverance, and optimism.

  Where the typical conservative argument on poverty falls short is that it often stops right there: Character matters . . . and that’s it. There’s not much society can do until poor people shape up and somehow develop better character. In the meantime, the rest of us are off the hook. We can lecture poor people, and we can punish them if they don’t behave the way we tell them to, but that’s where our responsibility ends.

  But in fact, this science suggests a very different reality. It says that the character strengths that matter so much to young people’s success are not innate; they don’t appear in us magically, as a result of good luck or good genes. And they are no
t simply a choice. They are rooted in brain chemistry, and they are molded, in measurable and predictable ways, by the environment in which children grow up. That means the rest of us—society as a whole—can do an enormous amount to influence their development in children. We now know a great deal about what kind of interventions will help children develop those strengths and skills, starting at birth and going all the way through college. Parents are an excellent vehicle for those interventions, but they are not the only vehicle. Transformative help also comes regularly from social workers, teachers, clergy members, pediatricians, and neighbors. We can argue about whether those interventions should be provided by the government or nonprofit organizations or religious institutions or a combination of the three. But what we can’t argue anymore is that there’s nothing we can do.

  When advocates for a new way of thinking about children and disadvantage make their case, they often base it in economics: as a nation, we should change our approach to child development because it will save us money and improve the economy. Jack Shonkoff, the director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard, has argued persuasively that an effective program of support for parents of low-income children while their kids are young would be much less expensive and more effective than our current approach of paying later on for remedial education and job training. James Heckman has taken the math a step further, calculating that the Perry Preschool produced between seven and twelve dollars of tangible benefit to the American economy for every dollar that was invested in it.

  But powerful though this economic case can be, the argument that resonates more with me is a purely personal one. When I spend time with young people growing up in adversity, I can’t help but feel two things. First, a sense of anger for what they’ve already missed. When Kewauna talks about the feeling of being warehoused in the WINGS classroom in her Minnesota middle school, watching movies and eating popcorn while the other kids learned math and metaphors, I feel the way Elizabeth Spiegel felt when she realized how little James Black had been taught about the world beyond the chessboard: I get mad on Kewauna’s behalf. She has to work twice as hard now as a result.

  And to her credit, she is working twice as hard. Which leads to my second reaction: a feeling of admiration and hope when I watch young people making the difficult and often painful choice to follow a better path, to turn away from what might have seemed like their inevitable destiny. James and Keitha and Kewauna are all working far harder than I ever did as a teenager to remake themselves and improve their lives. And every day they pull themselves up one more rung on the ladder to a more successful future. But for the rest of us, it’s not enough to just applaud their efforts and hope that someday, more young people follow their lead. They did not get onto that ladder alone. They are there only because someone helped them take the first step.

  Acknowledgments

  Gratitude is one of the seven character strengths that the teachers at KIPP and Riverdale are trying to nurture in their students, and I’m glad to have a chance to exercise it here for a few paragraphs: not enough space to thank all the people who helped me with this book, but enough to mention at least a few.

  My reporting benefited from the generosity and wisdom of many scholars and researchers, but I am especially grateful to James Heckman, Clancy Blair, Nadine Burke Harris, and Angela Duckworth, who not only shared with me their deep knowledge of their own fields but also helped me see connections that transcended traditional academic and scientific boundaries: the links between developmental psychology and labor economics; between criminology and pediatric medicine; between stress hormones and school reform.

  My thanks go as well to the educators who let me watch them work and took such great care in explaining why they did what they did, especially Elizabeth Spiegel, Jeff Nelson, David Levin, Elizabeth Dozier, Dominic Randolph, Tom Brunzell, K. C. Cohen, Michele Stefl, and Lanita Reed. Steve Gates might not describe himself as an educator, but I include him in this category as well; he certainly educated me, and his guidance and generosity enriched the time I spent in Roseland.

  I’m very grateful to the dozens of young people in Chicago and New York and San Francisco who told me their stories and answered my questions about their lives with honesty, insight, and grace, especially Keitha Jones, Monisha Sullivan, Thomas Gaston, James Black, and Kewauna Lerma.

  My thanks to everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who made this book a reality, especially my editor, Deanne Urmy, whose contributions are apparent on every page. I’m grateful to my agent, David McCormick, for his unwavering faith in this project, and to my speaking agent, Alia Hanna Habib, for all her support, encouragement, and advice. Thanks to Emmy Liss, who provided me with research assistance; she expanded my understanding of what it means for a child to grow up in deep disadvantage. Thanks to Charles William Wilson, who was intrepid and painstaking as he fact-checked much of the manuscript. I’m grateful as well to Katherine Bradley and her colleagues at the CityBridge Foundation for their help and support in the early stages of my reporting.

  I’m indebted to the friends and colleagues who read drafts and sections of this work and offered me advice, including Matt Bai and James Forman Jr., as well as two outstanding magazine editors, Vera Titunik and Daniel Zalewski, who helped turn some of my reporting for this book into articles for the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, respectively. Two more editors, both indispensable: When I could not find my way into or out of a chapter, my first call was invariably to Joel Lovell, who always had a solution. And after I finished a first draft of the book, Ira Glass guided me through some critical revisions, reading and offering advice on multiple drafts; I felt lucky to have the benefit of his keen eyes and ears.

  I send heartfelt thanks to the family and friends who offered support and counsel and welcome distraction along the way, including Susan Tough, Anne Tough, Allen Tough, Jack Hitt, Michael Pollan, Ethan Watters, Ann Clarke, Matt Klam, Kira Pollack, James Ryerson, Elana James, and Ilena Silverman.

  Above all, my thanks go to Paula, Ellington, and Georgie, for their help, their support, and their love. In the acknowledgments of my last book, I promised Paula that this one would be easier, and it wasn’t. But she persevered anyway, with patience and good humor and large helpings of grit. The research papers I immersed myself in while writing this book taught me a great deal about the transformative power of a family’s love—but that knowledge is nothing compared to what I learn from her each day.

  Notes on Sources

  page

  Introduction

  [>] a program called Tools of the Mind: For more on Tools of the Mind, see Paul Tough, “Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?,” New York Times Magazine, September 25, 2009.

  [>] the Rug Rat Race: Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey, The Rug Rat Race (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economics Research, January 2010).

  “Age 3 is the sweet spot”: Kate Zernike, “Fast-Tracking to Kindergarten?,” New York Times, May 13, 2011.

  You can trace its contemporary rise: Carnegie Task Force on Meeting the Needs of Young Children, Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children (New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1994).

  [>] One of the most famous of these studies: Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes, 1995).

  [>] At age twenty-two, Heckman found: James J. Heckman, John Eric Humphries, and Nicholas S. Mader, “The GED,” in Handbook of the Economics of Education, vol. 3, eds. Eric A. Hanushek et al. (Oxford: Elsevier, 2011), 455, figure 9.16. For more on Heckman’s GED research, see James J. Heckman, Jingjing Hsse, and Yona Rubinstein, “The GED Is a ‘Mixed Signal’: The Effect of Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills on Human Capital and Labor Market Outcomes,” unpublished paper, revised March 2002; and James J. Heckman and Yona Rubinstein, “The Importance of Noncognitive Skills: Lessons from the GED Testing Program,” American Economic Review 91, no. 2 (May 2001).


  [>] “Inadvertently, the GED has become a test”: Pedro Carneiro and James J. Heckman, “Human Capital Policy,” in Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies?, eds. James J. Heckman and Alan B. Krueger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 141.

  [>] the Perry students were more likely to graduate: James J. Heckman, Seong Hyeok Moon, Rodrigo Pinto, Peter A. Savelyev, and Adam Yavitz, “The Rate of Return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program,” Journal of Public Economics 94, nos. 1 and 2 (February 2010). For more on Perry, see James Heckman, Lena Malofeeva, Rodrigo Pinto, and Peter Savelyev, “Understanding the Mechanisms Through Which an Influential Early Childhood Program Boosted Adult Outcomes,” unpublished paper, November 23, 2011.

  [>] “personal behavior” and “social development”: James Heckman, Lena Malofeeva, Rodrigo Pinto, and Peter Savelyev, “Enhancements in Noncognitive Capacities Explain Most of the Effects of the Perry Preschool Program,” unpublished paper, January 13, 2010.