Review: How Children Succeed

Review

I slowly started Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. I finished it fast. Not out of interest - I got bored, then confused, then raced through to grab highlights of the more interesting works the author was citing.

This reads like a book written under the cloud of a contract deadline. Where the author attempts to weave in storyline, everything gets tangled, convuleted by disparate notes. You may have the thought picking up the book that you’ll learn how children succeed. You won’t get a clear answer, but the author’s conclusions wander until he lands on proposing a comprehensive government approach.

Your motivation to pick up a book like this might be different. Mine was to get a sense of what I could do to be a good dad, a good uncle, a mentor and a coach. How can I help the young ones in my life build their character?

If that sounds similar to you, this book will feel shallow, but it will point you to deeper water.

Notes and Quotes

To Remember

Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, has analyzed two separate neurological systems that develop in childhood and early adulthood that together have a profound effect on the lives of adolescents. The problem is, these two systems are not well aligned. The first, called the incentive processing system, makes you more sensation seeking, more emotionally reactive, more attentive to social information. (If you’ve ever been a teenager, this may sound familiar.) The second, called the cognitive control system, allows you to regulate all those urges. The reason the teenage years have always been such a perilous time, Steinberg says, is that the incentive processing system reaches its full power in early adolescence while the cognitive control system doesn’t finish maturing until you’re in your twenties. pg. 21, loc. 563 - Teach to children.

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. pg. 28, loc. 664

Pessimists, Seligman wrote, tend to react to negative events by explaining them as permanent, personal, and pervasive. (Seligman calls these “the three P’s.”) Failed a test? It’s not because you didn’t prepare well; it’s because you’re stupid. If you get turned down for a date, there’s no point in asking someone else; you’re simply unlovable. Optimists, by contrast, look for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and as a result, in the face of a setback, they’re more likely to pick themselves up and try again. pg. 54, loc. 1068

Motivation, it turns out, is quite complex, and rewards sometimes backfire. In their book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner recount the story of a study researchers undertook in the 1970s to see if giving blood donors a small financial stipend might increase blood donations. The result was actually that fewer people gave blood, not more. pg. 66, loc. 1259

In fact, the character-strength approach of Seligman and Peterson isn’t an expansion of programs like CARE; if anything, it is a repudiation of them. In 2008, a national organization called the Character Education Partnership published a paper that divided character education into two categories: programs that develop “moral character,” which embodies ethical values like fairness, generosity, and integrity; and those that address “performance character,” which includes values like effort, diligence, and perseverance. The CARE program falls firmly on the “moral character” side of the divide, but the seven strengths that Randolph and Levin chose for their schools leaned much more heavily toward performance character: while they do have a moral component, strengths like zest, optimism, social intelligence, and curiosity aren’t particularly heroic; they make you think of Steve Jobs or Bill Clinton more than Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi. pg. 78, loc. 1470

The problem, as Randolph has realized, is that the 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. “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.” pg. 85, loc. 1585

The intervention, which goes by the rather clunky name of Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions, or MCII, was developed by NYU psychologist Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues. Oettingen discovered in her research that people tend to use three strategies when they are setting goals and that two of those strategies don’t work very well. Optimists favor indulging, which means imagining the future they’d like to achieve (for a middle-school student, that might mean getting an A in math next year) and vividly envisioning all the good things that will go along with it—the praise, the self-satisfaction, the future success. Oettingen found that indulging feels really good when you’re doing it—it can trigger a nice dopamine surge—but it doesn’t correlate at all with actual achievement. Pessimists tend to use a strategy Oettingen calls dwelling, which involves thinking about all the things that will get in the way of their accomplishing their goals. If our prototypical middle-school student hoping for an A in math was a dweller, he might think about how he never finishes his homework, and there’s never anywhere quiet for him to study anyway, and besides, he always gets distracted in class. Unsurprisingly, dwelling doesn’t correlate well with achievement either. The third method is called mental contrasting, and it combines elements of the other two methods. It means concentrating on a positive outcome and simultaneously concentrating on the obstacles in the way. Doing both at the same time, Duckworth and Oettingen wrote in a recent paper, “creates a strong association between future and reality that signals the need to overcome the obstacles in order to attain the desired future.” The next step to a successful outcome, according to Oettingen, is creating a series of “implementation intentions”—specific plans in the form of if/then statements that link the obstacles with ways to overcome them, such as “If I get distracted by TV after school, then I will wait to watch TV until after I finish my homework.” Oettingen has demonstrated the effectiveness of MCII in a variety of experiments: the strategy has helped dieters eat more fruits and vegetables, high-school juniors prepare more diligently for the practice SAT, and chronic-back-pain patients gain more mobility. pg. 92, loc. 1693

When I go into a lot of schools, I see posters that say ‘Dream it and you can achieve it!’ But we need to get away from positive fantasizing about how we’re all going to grow up to be rich and famous, and start thinking about the obstacles that now stand in the way of getting to where we want to be.” pg. 93, loc. 1711

Rules, Kessler points out, are not the same as willpower. They are a metacognitive substitute for willpower. By making yourself a rule (“I never eat fried dumplings”), you can sidestep the painful internal conflict between your desire for fried foods and your willful determination to resist them. Rules, Kessler explains, “provide structure, preparing us for encounters with tempting stimuli and redirecting our attention elsewhere.” Before long, the rules have become as automatic as the appetites they are deflecting. pg. 93, loc. 1717

Dweck’s notion that students do better when they think they can improve their intelligence applies to character as well. pg. 98, loc. 1788 Apply the growth mindset to character, not just intelligence.

In the early twentieth century, the Austrian philosopher Sir Karl Popper wrote that the nature of scientific thought was such that one could never truly verify scientific theories; the only way to test the validity of any particular theory was to prove it wrong, a process he labeled falsification. This idea made its way into cognitive science with the observation that most people are actually quite bad at falsification—not just in science but in daily life. When testing a theory, however large or small, an individual doesn’t instinctively look for evidence that contradicts it; he looks for data that prove him right, a tendency known as confirmation bias. pg. 138, loc. 2402

Other

Tools of the Mind, by contrast, doesn’t focus much on reading and math abilities. 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 founders of Tools of the Mind believe that these skills, which they group together under the rubric self-regulation, will do more to lead to positive outcomes for their students, in first grade and beyond, than the traditional menu of pre-academic skills. loc. 38

But in the past decade, and especially in the past few years, a disparate congregation of economists, educators, psychologists, and neuroscientists have begun to produce evidence that calls into question many of the assumptions behind the cognitive hypothesis. What matters most in a child’s development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. 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. loc. 82

As Heckman explained in one paper: “Inadvertently, the GED has become a test that separates bright but nonpersistent and undisciplined dropouts from other dropouts.” GED holders, he wrote, “are ‘wise guys’ who lack the ability to think ahead, persist in tasks, or to adapt to their environments.” What the GED study didn’t give Heckman was any indication of whether it was possible to help children develop those so-called soft skills. loc. 153

When you hear stories about schools like Fenger, they are often told in the language of neglect: a school on the margins, students who have been forgotten and ignored by the bureaucrats downtown and in Washington. But the strange thing about Fenger High School is that it hasn’t been ignored. Not at all. Instead, over the course of the past two decades, it has been the focus of repeated ambitious and well-financed reforms by some of the most respected education officials and philanthropists in the country. Just about every strategy anyone has come up with for improving failing public high schools has been tried, in some form or another, at Fenger. pg. 2, loc. 260

The behavior outcomes, though surprising in their intensity, at least made some intuitive sense. Psychologists had long believed that traumatic events in childhood could produce feelings of low self-esteem or worthlessness, and it was reasonable to assume that those feelings could lead to addiction, depression, and even suicide. And some of the health effects that turned up in the ACE study, like liver disease and diabetes and lung cancer, were most likely the result, at least in part, of self-destructive behaviors like heavy drinking, overeating, and smoking. 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. pg. 11, loc. 395

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. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school. When you’re overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses and distracted by negative feelings, it’s hard to learn the alphabet. And in fact, when kindergarten teachers are surveyed about their students, they say that the biggest problem they face is not children who don’t know their letters and numbers; it is kids who don’t know how to manage their tempers or calm themselves down after a provocation. In one national survey, 46 percent of kindergarten teachers said that at least half the kids in their class had problems following directions. In another study, Head Start teachers reported that more than a quarter of their students exhibited serious self-control-related negative behaviors, such as kicking or threatening other students, at least once a week. pg. 17, loc. 490

One famous test of executive-function ability is called the Stroop test. You see the word red written in green letters, and someone asks you what color that word is. It takes some effort to stop yourself from saying red, and the skills you’re drawing on when you resist that impulse are executive functions. And those skills are especially valuable in school. We’re constantly asking kids to deal with contradictory information. The letter C is pronounced like a K—unless it is pronounced like an S. Tale and tail sound the same but have different meanings. A zero means one thing on its own and an entirely different thing with a one in front of it. 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. And whether you’re utilizing your self-control in the emotional realm or the cognitive realm, that ability is crucially important to getting through the school day, whether you’re in kindergarten or your senior year of high school. pg. 18, loc. 512

When they used statistical techniques to factor out the effect of allostatic load, the poverty effect disappeared completely. 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. pg. 20, loc. 541

The reason that researchers who care about the gap between rich and poor are so excited about executive functions is that these skills are not only highly predictive of success; they are also quite malleable, much more so than other cognitive skills. The prefrontal cortex is more responsive to intervention than other parts of the brain, and it stays flexible well into adolescence and early adulthood. So if we can improve a child’s environment in the specific ways that lead to better executive functioning, we can increase his prospects for success in a particularly efficient way. pg. 21, loc. 552

Whatever permutation they chose, though, however they performed the experiment, they found the same thing: what mattered was not the licking-and-grooming habits of the biological mother; it was the licking-and-grooming habits of the rearing mother. When a pup received the comforting experience of licking and grooming as an infant, it grew up to be braver and bolder and better adjusted than a pup who hadn’t, whether or not its biological mother was the one who had done the licking and grooming. pg. 30, loc. 705

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. pg. 33, loc. 753

She and her mother argued all the time, but they never came to blows; Keitha believed it was wrong to strike an adult. “So that’s why I used to come to school, just to fight,” she told me. “That was the way for me to relieve the stress. I didn’t talk to people about my problems. I just let them build up inside until I was ready to explode. And so when I got to school, as soon as someone said something to me that I didn’t like, I’d take my anger out on them, because I knew I couldn’t hit my mama.” In her freshman year at Fenger, Keitha piled up multiple disciplinary infractions, one ten-day suspension after another, until she had a reputation as one of the most violent kids at a violent school. “That’s how everybody thought of me,” she said. “As a fighter. I used to brag on it.” pg. 44, loc. 929 Hurt people hurt people.

Learned Optimism, a book by Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Seligman is one of the main scholars behind the school of thought known as positive psychology, and the book, originally published in 1991, is the movement’s founding text, teaching that optimism is a learnable skill, not an inborn trait. Pessimistic adults and children can train themselves to be more hopeful, Seligman says, and if they do, they will likely become happier, healthier, and more successful. In Learned Optimism, Seligman wrote that for most people, depression was not an illness, as most psychologists believed, but simply a “severe low mood” that occurred “when we harbor pessimistic beliefs about the causes of our setbacks.” 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. pg. 53, loc. 1061

In the winter of 2005, Randolph read Learned Optimism, and he became intrigued by the field of positive psychology. He began to read up on the work of not only Seligman but also two of Seligman’s frequent collaborators: Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan and Angela Duckworth, one of Seligman’s star protégées at Penn. pg. 57, loc. 1122

But before long, the Clintons’ character campaign devolved into finger-pointing and mutual suspicion between advocates on both ends of the political spectrum; the right suspected that character-education initiatives were a cloak for creeping political correctness, and the left suspected the initiatives were hidden attempts at Christian indoctrination. Hundreds of American public schools now have some kind of character-education program in place, but most of them are vague and superficial, and those that have been studied rigorously have generally been found to be ineffective. A national evaluation of character-education programs published in 2010 by the National Center for Education Research, part of the federal Department of Education, studied seven popular elementary-school programs over three consecutive years. It found no significant impact at all from the programs—not on student behavior, not on academic achievement, not on school culture. pg. 59, loc. 1161

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. The long-term goals Duckworth hoped kids would aspire to were less tangible and immediate and attractive than two marshmallows after twenty minutes. So how do you help children acquire the focus and persistence they will need for longer-term, more abstract goals: passing a test or graduating from high school or succeeding in college? pg. 64, loc. 1226

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? pg. 65, loc. 1246

They did better for a simple reason: they tried harder. And what the labor market does value is the kind of internal motivation required to try hard on a test even when there is no external reward for doing well. Without anyone realizing it, the coding test was measuring a critical noncognitive skill that mattered a lot in the grown-up world. pg. 69, loc. 1320

But what Segal’s experiment suggests is that it was actually their first score, the 79, that was more relevant to their future prospects. That was their equivalent of the coding-test score, the low-stakes, low-reward test that predicts how well someone is going to do in life. They may not have been low in IQ, but they were low in whatever quality it is that makes a person try hard on an IQ test without any obvious incentive. And what Segal’s research shows is that that is a very valuable quality to possess. pg. 69, loc. 1328

Like the word character, the word conscientiousness has some strong and not always positive associations outside academia. “Researchers prefer to study the things they value,” he told me. “And the people in society who value conscientiousness are not intellectuals, and they’re not academics, and they’re not liberals. They tend to be religious-right conservatives who think people should be more controlled.” pg. 70, loc. 1342

Duckworth felt that Levin, who was about her age, possessed some trait that she did not: a passionate commitment to a single mission and an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word grit. pg. 74, loc. 1407

For both rich and poor teenagers, certain family characteristics predicted children’s maladjustment, including low levels of maternal attachment, high levels of parental criticism, and minimal afterschool adult supervision. Among the affluent children, Luthar found, the main cause of distress was “excessive achievement pressures and isolation from parents—both physical and emotional.” pg. 83, loc. 1550

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. What Riverdale offers parents, above all else, is a high probability of nonfailure. pg. 85, loc. 1583

To Tom Brunzell, what is going on in a moment like that isn’t academic instruction at all, or even discipline; it’s therapy. Specifically, it’s a kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy, the practical psychological technique that provides the theoretical underpinning for the whole positive psychology field. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, involves using the conscious mind to recognize negative or self-destructive thoughts or interpretations and to (sometimes literally) talk yourself into a better perspective. “The kids who succeed at KIPP are the ones who can CBT themselves in the moment,” Brunzell told me. As he saw it, part of the job for him and the other KIPP teachers was giving their students the tools to do that. “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.’” pg. 91, loc. 1672

One of the things that first appealed to David Levin about Learned Optimism, in fact, was Martin Seligman’s assertion that the most fruitful time to transform pessimistic children into optimistic ones was “before puberty, but late enough in childhood so that they are metacognitive (capable of thinking about thinking)”—in pg. 91, loc. 1681

Strategies like MCII, or the act of imagining a picture frame around a marshmallow—in the end, these are just tricks to make the virtuous path easier to follow. pg. 95, loc. 1734

Psychologists have demonstrated that group identity can have a powerful effect on achievement—both a positive and a negative one. pg. 96, loc. 1749

But a psychologist at Stanford named Carol Dweck has discovered a remarkable thing: Regardless of the facts on the malleability of intelligence, students do much better academically if they believe intelligence is malleable. Dweck divides people into two types: those who have a fixed mindset, who believe that intelligence and other skills are essentially static and inborn, and those who have a growth mindset, who believe that intelligence can be improved. She has shown that students’ mindsets predict their academic trajectories: those who believe that people can improve their intelligence actually do improve their grades. And whether or not intelligence is malleable, mindset certainly is. Dweck and others have shown that with the right kind of intervention, students can be switched from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, and their academic results tend to rise as a result. pg. 97, loc. 1769

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. pg. 114, loc. 2017

It’s a little like what people ideally get out of psychotherapy, Spiegel says. You go over the mistakes you made—or the mistakes you keep making—and you try to get to the bottom of why you made them. And just like the best therapists, Spiegel tries to lead her students down a narrow and difficult path: to have them take responsibility for their mistakes and learn from them without obsessing over them or beating themselves up for them. “Very rarely do kids have an experience in life of losing when it was entirely in their control,” she told me. “But when they lose a chess game, they know that they have no one to blame but themselves. They had everything they needed to win, and they lost. If that happens to you once, you can usually find some excuse, or just never think about it again. When it’s part of your life, when it happens to you every single weekend, you have to find a way to separate yourself from your mistakes or your losses. I try to teach my students that losing is something you do, not something you are.” pg. 115, loc. 2041

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. pg. 193, loc. 3256

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. pg. 194, loc. 3279 Is this really the thesis? Massive government intervention for a problem that is so incredible difficult to untangle?