The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs.
But in How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues that the qualities that matter most have more to do with character: skills like perseverance, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-control.
How Children Succeed introduces us to a new generation of researchers and educators who, for the first time, are using the tools of science to peel back the mysteries of character. Through their stories—and the stories of the children they are trying to help—Tough traces the links between childhood stress and life success. He uncovers the surprising ways in which parents do—and do not—prepare their children for adulthood. And he provides us with new insights into how to help children growing up in poverty.
Early adversity, scientists have come to understand, can not only affect the conditions of children’s lives, it can alter the physical development of their brains as well. But now educators and doctors around the country are using that knowledge to develop innovative interventions that allow children to overcome the constraints of poverty. And with the help of these new strategies, as Tough’s extraordinary reporting makes clear, children who grow up in the most painful circumstances can go on to achieve amazing things.
This provocative and profoundly hopeful book has the potential to change how we raise our children, how we run our schools, and how we construct our social safety net. It will not only inspire and engage readers, it will also change our understanding of childhood itself.
About Paul Tough
Paul Tough is the author of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America and the author of a series of acclaimed articles on character and childhood in the New York Times Magazineand the New Yorker. He is a contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine and a frequent contributor to the public-radio program This American Life. He lives with his wife and son in New York.
Editorial Review
Building on reporting for his magazine, the author interviewed economists, psychologists and neuroscientists, examined their recent research, and talked to students, teachers and principals to produce this fascinating overview of a new approach with “the potential to change how we raise our children, how we run our schools, and how we construct our social safety net.” At a time when policymakers favor the belief that disadvantaged kids have insufficient cognitive training, Tough finds that a new generation of researchers are questioning the cognitive hypothesis. Foremost among them is Nobel laureate and University of Chicago economist James Heckman, who since 2008 has been convening economists and psychologists to discuss significant questions: Which skills and traits lead to success? How do they develop in childhood? What interventions might help children do better? Tough summarizes key research, such as the Adverse Childhood Experience Study, a project of the Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente, which revealed a stunning correlation between traumatic childhood events and negative adult outcomes. Others have shown that the effects of childhood stress can be buffered by close, nurturing relationships. Assessing such evidence, Heckman says policymakers intent on closing the achievement gap between affluent and poor children must go beyond classroom interventions and supplement the parenting resources of disadvantaged Americans. Families, he says, “are the main drivers of children’s success in school.” Heckman’s thinking informs the book, which includes many examples of failing disadvantaged students who turned things around by acquiring character skills that substituted for the social safety net enjoyed by affluent students. – Kirkus Reviews
‘Children Succeed’ With Character, Not Test Scores
NPR Book Review – September 4, 2012 (Excerpt)
A child’s success can’t be measured in IQ scores, standardized tests or vocabulary quizzes, says author Paul Tough. Success, he argues, is about how young people build character. Tough explores this idea in his new book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character.
“For some people, [the] path to college is so easy that they can get out into life and they’ve never really been challenged,” he tells NPR’s David Greene. “I think they get into their 20s and 30s and they really feel lost — they feel like they never had those character-building experiences as adolescents, as kids, that really make a difference when they get to adulthood.”
That wasn’t true for the teenagers Tough met during the time he spent in some of Chicago’s roughest neighborhoods. There, he worked with teenagers overcoming unimaginable challenges. One young woman he worked with had been sexually abused by a relative, was getting into fights in school and was on the verge of dropping out. But then she entered an intensive mentoring program that changed her life. [Read the full article...]
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