Paul Tough's Book on How Children Succeed

Early in the school year, I wrote a blog on the positive reviews Paul Tough's book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character received.

Last year I wrote a blog on an article Paul Tough wrote on how KIPP schools and highly-prestigious Riverdale Country School were attempting (with varying degrees of success) to include character--specifically habits, skills, and attitudes that help in academic achievement (hence performance rather than moral character)--in student progress reports.

Over Winter Break I finally had the opportunity to read Tough's book, and, while I don't want this blog to become one long ode to Paul Tough, his ideas resonate so much with me that I had to begin 2013 with a synopsis of his most recent book.

(My favorite book on education is Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, but Tough's book now prominently rests next to Willingham's.)

Tough begins his book by explaining that the American educational system remains predicated on the cognitive hypothesis: "the belief...that success depends primarily on cognitive skills--the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests...and that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible."

However, research over the past ten years--be it in psychology, neuroscience, education, even economics--is character skills and habits like persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence are much more important for academic success than cognitive ability. Tough references a research study that found that these habits and skills are more than two thirds more crucial than cognitive ability in academic success.

These habits and skills extend far beyond school and help a person in the workplace and in life in general.

He furthermore states that these habits and skills are not imprinted in each of us from birth but can be developed and honed by parents and schools.

To Tough, "we need to approach childhood anew, to start over with some fundamental questions about how parents affect their children; how human skills develop; how character is formed."

I won't go into Tough's description of the effects of stress and nurture in a child's (and rats') early lives, but if you read the book and are a parent,  you'll probably re-visit how you treated your kids as infants. (FYI, in one of the final printed issues of Newsweek, Jared Dimond wrote an interesting article about the difference in child-rearing in current nomadic cultures versus sedentary cultures.)

Tough devotes a chapter to how both affluent and low-income families can fall short in providing physical and emotional support to their children needed to develop these critical performance character habits and skills.

"For both rich and poor teenagers, certain family characteristics predicted maladjustment, including low levels of maternal attachment, high levels of parental criticism, and minimal after-school supervision. Among affluent children, the main cause of distress was excessive achievment pressures and isolation from parents--both physical and emotional."

Tough concludes his book by describing how he parents his infant son: he recognizes that being a parent is much more difficult than advising people how to parent.

Yet, he writes that from researching and writing this book, he has moved away from the cognitive hypothesis and is now focusing more on nurturing and supporting his son as well as helping him "learn to manage failure." Before Winter Break I wrote a blog where psychologist Robert Evans in a webcast advised parents to let their children learn from failure. I prefer Tough's advice to allow children to learn how to "manage failure."

Tough closes his book with the following: "Science says that the character strengths that matter so much to young's 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 not 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...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."