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

by Paul Tough

I, Michael Parker, own this book and took these notes to further my own learning. If you enjoy these notes, please purchase the book!

Chapter 1: How To Fail (And How Not To)

• pg 5: You can't expect to solve the problems of a school without taking into account what's happening in the community.
• pg 9: Many problems we generally think of as social issues are best analyzed and addressed on the molecular level, down deep in the realm of human biology.
• pg 10: The ACE study demonstrated a stunning correlation between adverse childhood experiences and negative adult outcomes.
• pg 11: The study also found that such experiences had a profound negative effect on adult health even when self-destructive behaviors like heavy drinking, overeating, and smoking weren't present.
• pg 12: Our stress-response system, or the HPA axis, evolved to react to brief and acute stress. Turning it on for months on end is highly destructive.
• pg 13: Managing stress is called allostasis. The gradual breaking down of your stress management systems is called allostatic load.
• pg 13: The HPA axis can't distinguish between different types of threat, so it activates every defense, all at once, in response to any threat.
• pg 16: Doctors are trying to create an allostatic-load index as a biological-risk indicator, similar to blood pressure.
• pg 17: Early stress affects the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds. Consequently, children who grow up in stressful environments have more learning or behavioral problems.
• pg 18: The prefrontal cortex also dictates executive functions, which refer to the ability to deal with confusing and unpredictable situations and information. Students must do this all the time.
• pg 19: Whether you're utilizing self-control in the emotional realm or in the cognitive realm, that ability is crucial to getting through a school day.
• pg 20: Poverty doesn't compromise the executive function abilities of poor children -- it's the stress that goes along with poverty.
• pg 21: This was encouraging, as the prefrontal cortex is mores responsive to intervention than other parts of the brain, and remains flexible through early adulthood.
• pg 22: The incentive processing system reaches full power in early adolescence, while the cognitive control system that keeps it in check doesn't finish maturing until you're in your twenties.
• pg 28: Parents and other caregivers who form nurturing relationships with their children can foster resilience that protects them from many of the worst effects of a harsh environment.
• pg 30: Rats that were licked and groomed as children were smarter, more social, more curious, less aggressive, had better self-control, were healthier, and lived longer.
• pg 31: Licking and grooming affixes certain chemicals to a pup's DNA, a process called methylation, and so subtle parenting behaviors had predictable and long-lasting DNA-related effects.
• pg 33: In 1950s, behaviorists thought you should not "spoil" infants by picking them or up or otherwise comforting them when they cried.
• pg 34: Attachment theory showed that the effect of early nurturance was the opposite, creating a "secure base" from which a child could explore the world.
• pg 35: Children with "secure attachment" early on were shown to be more socially competent throughout their lives.
• pg 38: If a new mother experienced "insecure attachment" with her parents at a child, it will be more difficult to create secure attachment for her child without help.
• pg 40: Intervention with parents alone can create in their children secure attachment and shift their cortisol patterns from dysfunctional to normal.
• pg 41: Anxiety-producing parenting can be undone with a relatively minor intervention, unlike previous early-childhood interventions that focused on the importance of early language skills.
• pg 48: Pure IQ is stubbornly resistant to improvement after age 8, but executive functions and the ability to handle stress and manage strong emotions can be improved well into adolescence.

Chapter 2: How to Build Character

• pg 52: Noncognitive skills or character strengths like optimism and resilience and social agility are important for young people without the benefit of a lot of family resources.
• pg 54: The book Learned Optimism says that pessimists view negative events as permanent, personal, and pervasive, while optimists find specific, limited, short-term explanations.
• pg 58: The meaning of character is difficult to define because it often represents adherence to a particular set of values, and so its definition will necessarily change over time.
• pg 59: Character is not innate or unchanging. It is a set of abilities and strengths that you can learn, can practice, and can teach.
• pg 62: In the "marshmallow test," children who had been able to wait 15 minutes for their treat had SAT score that were, on average, 210 points higher than those who had demanded the treat after 30 seconds.
• pg 63: In that test, children who did the best created their own distractions, or followed prompts to think more abstractly about the marshmallow.
• pg 64: The mechanics of achievement can be divided into motivation and volition, where the latter is the willpower and self-control to start along the path of a goal.
• pg 67: What motivates us is hard to explain or measure, and part of the complexity is that different personality types responds to different motivations.
• pg 69: A low-stakes, low-reward test like the coding-speed test is a reliable predictor of how well someone will do in life.
• pg 70: This trait is termed conscientiousness. The other important personality dimensions are agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience.
• pg 71: High conscientiousness favorably predicts better grades, more workplace success, fewer crimes, healthier marriages, and longer lives.
• pg 74: Conscientiousness is different from grit, which is a passionate commitment to a single mission and an unswerving dedication to achieving that mission.
• pg 78: Moral character embodies ethical values like fairness, generosity, and integrity, while performance character embodies values like effort, diligence, and perseverance.
• pg 82: Wealthy parents are more likely than others to be emotionally distant from their children while also insisting on high levels of achievement.
• pg 83: Consequently, affluent teenagers use alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, and harder illegal drugs more than low-income teens. They also suffer from elevated rates of depression.
• pg 84: Parents making more than one million dollars a year were, by a wide margin, the group most likely to say that they were less strict than their own parents.
• pg 85: Private schools do not raise the ceiling, but raise the floor, bestowing connections and credentials that will make it hard for a child to fall out of the upper class.
• pg 85: The best way for a child to build character is to attempt a high risk endeavor, where there is a real and serious possibility of failure.
• pg 89: Code-switching is the ability to recognize and accurately perform the behaviors appropriate to each different cultural setting.
• pg 91: Cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, uses the conscious mind to recognize negative or self-destructive thoughts or interpretations and to talk oneself into a better perspective.
• pg 93: You are more likely to achieve a goal if you concentrate on the positive outcome and the obstacles in the way. Optimists focus only on the former, pessimists only on the later.
• pg 94: Setting rules for yourself are a metacognitive substitute for willpower. They provide structure, prepare one for encounters with tempting stimuli, and redirect attention elsewhere.
• pg 96: The stereotype threat says giving one a subtle psychological cue having to do with his or her group identify before a test of intellectual or physical ability can affect performance.
• pg 97: Students gain confidence, perform better, and defend against the stereotype threat when they transition from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, which says that intelligence is malleable.
• pg 103: Character can substitute for the support from families and schools and culture that protects other students from the consequences of occasional detours and mistakes and bad decisions.

Chapter 3: How to Think

• pg 114: Cognitive flexibility is the ability to see alternative solutions to problems. Cognitive self-control is the ability to substitute a habitual response for a more effective, less obvious one.
• pg 120: Children in early adolescence may be motivated best by the unexpected experience of someone taking them seriously, believing in their abilities, and challenging them to improve themselves.
• pg 121: Schools rarely encourage rigorous self-analysis. Many schools and teachers believe that it is their job only to convey information.
• pg 131: It is not enough to want something; you must choose it. You will reveal your choice through your behavior and your determination, so that every action says "This is who I am."
• pg 133: Hungarian psychologist Laszlo Polgar argued that parents could turn any child into an intellectual prodigy with hard work. He raised both the first female grand master, and the youngest grand master.
• pg 136: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow those optimal experiences when a person feels free of mundane distractions, in control of his fate, and totally engaged by the moment.
• pg 137: Some players can play blindfold chess not because they have photographic memories, but because they remembered patterns, vectors, and even moods.
• pg 138: The best chess players do not consider more possible outcomes than novices. They simply contemplate the right ones, and never contemplate the less promising options.
• pg 138: When testing a theory, we succumb to confirmation bias, or looking for data that proves us right. We don't attempt falsification, or look for contradictory evidence.

Chapter 4: How to Succeed

• pg 149: Only 5 percent of American males born in 1900 graduated from college. This doubled between 1925 and 1945, and then again between 1945 and 1965 thanks to the GI Bill.
• pg 150: Among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the United States is eighth in college enrollment, but it is second to last in college completion.
• pg 150: Our college-graduate wage premium is the highest in the developed world. A BA can expect to earn 83% more than an American with only a high-school diploma.
• pg 151: Undermatching affects disadvantaged thigh school graduates, meaning they attend colleges below what their GPAs and standardized-test scores qualify them for.
• pg 153: Graduation rates are not correlated with intelligence, like the ACT or SAT attempts to measure, but character strengths, which a high GPA is indicative of.
• pg 161: The current high school system was developed to train students not for college but for the workplace, where collegiate skills like critical thinking and problem solving were not highly valued.
• pg 162: Between 1980 and 2002, the percentage of American tenth graders who said they wanted a BA doubled from 40 percent to 80 percent.
• pg 165: An ACT prep course that improves students' scores not only opens access to more colleges, but reinforces the growth mindset message, that one can get smarter and do better.
• pg 168: Noncognitive skills like resilience and resourcefulness and grit are more useful in getting a college student to graduation day than a high ACT score.
• pg 172: In 1961, the average full-time college student spent 24 hours per week studying outside the classroom. By 1981, it was 20 hours per week. By 2003, it was 14 hours per week.

Chapter 5: A Better Path

• pg 184: There are fewer entrepreneurs, iconoclasts, or artists graduating from our best colleges now. In 2010, more than half the graduating class went into investment banking or consulting.
• pg 184: Such undergraduates want to close down as few options and possible and only do things that increase the possibility of future overachievement. Recruiters for these industries cater to this psychology.
• pg 186: In the 1960s and 1990s there was debate about solving poverty, but not today. In 1966, child poverty stood at 17 percent; now it stands at 22 percent.
• pg 187: Education and poverty used to be two separate topics in public policy, but now we have replaced them with one conversation about the achievement gap between the rich and the poor.
• pg 188: This happened when the idea surfaced that improving the academics of poor children could help them escape the cycle of poverty, since it's been shown that kids who do well in school do well in life.
• pg 189: The consensus of most reform advocates is that there are far too many underperforming teachers, and we must change how such teachers are hired, trained, compensated, and fired.
• pg 190: Research on teachers remains inconclusive: We don't know how to predict top-tier teachers, or whether a string of such teachers produces a cumulative positive effect on low-income students.
• pg 191: Focusing on teacher quality has lost sight of a larger issue, namely what this country can do to significantly improve the life chances of millions of poor children.
• pg 191: The most popular school reforms, including high-performing charter schools, work best with the most able low-income children, and don't work well with the least able.
• pg 192: The education department's low income designation covers 40 percent of children. Ten percent of all children grow up in families that earn less than $11,000 annually, or less than half of the poverty line.
• pg 192: Statistically, such children are raised by a poorly educated, never-married single mother. Family members are unemployed and may have disability, depression, or substance abuse.
• pg 193: No one has found a reliable way to help deeply disadvantaged children. Instead we have an ad hoc system of government agencies and programs that follow them through childhood and adolescence.
• pg 194: A coordinated system instead could not only be cheaper, and would save lives and money not just in the long run, but right away.
• pg 195: To liberals, the science says that we must concede to the conservatives' point that character matters. Conservatives think that we're off the hook until poor people shape up and develop better character.
• pg 196: But science suggests that character strengths that matter for kids are not innate and they are not a choice. They are rooted in brain chemistry and are molded in measurable and predictable ways.