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How Children Succeed

Page history last edited by Chris Yeh 10 years, 7 months ago

How Children Succeed

Grit, Curiousity, and the Hidden Power of Character

by Paul Tough

 

  • The biggest obstacles to academic success that poor children face are 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
  • Those of us who don't live in low-income homes are understandably uneasy talking about family dysfunction in those homes, especially when they don't have the material advantages you do, and especially when the person making the comments is white and the parents in question are black.
  • The new science of adversity presents a real challenge to deeply held political beliefs on 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 of conscientiousness, grit, resilience, and optimism. 
    • But the character strengths that matter so much to young people's success are not innate, and they are not simply a choice.  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.  Parents are an excellent vehicle for those interventions, but they are not the only vehicle
  • 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 calculates that the Perry Preschool produced between $7-12 of tangible benefit to the American economy for every dollar invested. 

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