How Children Succeed? With Support from Those Around Them
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How Children Succeed? With Support from Those Around Them
10/30/2012 10:23:22 AM

The new, best-selling book How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, makes an important and hopeful argument: what we know now from neuroscience, psychology, and economics research—and from the experiences of families, teachers, youth workers, and kids—demonstrates that communities have the power to instill in children much of what kids need for lifelong success.

I had the great privilege of getting to speak with the author last week, just before his visit to Texas for a series of appearances, where he discussed the book, the case it makes for attention to "non-cognitive" skills, and innovative efforts, ranging from parent home-visiting services to quality preschool to mentoring for high schoolers, that are helping more children develop traits that lead to a brighter future. Excerpts from our conversation:

Texans Care for Children: So this set of traits in children you write about—things like grit and optimism and curiosity—have a big role to play in childen’s later success. It seems as though, unlike IQ, these are things adults arguably can help shape in almost any child. Can you discuss that some?

Paul Tough: There is evidence in neuroscience and psychology that suggests that IQ certainly is affected by issues early on, by the environments that kids live in. But after a certain point, age 8 or so, IQ doesn’t really develop or change at all. There are certain interventions that have worked with disadvantaged kids to raise IQ a couple of points, but that phases out over time. So it does seem like changing IQ is pretty difficult.

But there’s lots of evidence that influencing kids in non-cognitive skills, like grit or optimism, is certainly possible—and it’s possible later on in a child’s life. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls those personality traits, is the last part of the brain to stay malleable and plastic. It stays malleable in adolescence and even early adulthood. That’s the neuroscience basis for this idea that, even in adolescence, we can still help kids develop these character strengths.

There’s also evidence from the types of interventions that I’ve written about that, especially when kids are able to form close relationships, with a coach, a mentor, a teacher, a parent, or a family member, it makes a difference. I certainly saw in my reporting—and there’s lots of people, teachers and others, who can attest to this from their own lives—poor kids even well into adolescence can make a profound transformation. And we know that that can make a difference in terms of their school success and in terms of their success defeating obstacles.

Texans Care: You make the point in your book that a lot of the places where we as a society have been looking for solutions in terms of achievement for kids may not be the right places. Where did we used to go for solutions, and what environments maybe need more attention than they’ve been getting?

PT: What I was talking about there was the academic achievement gap. Kids from poor communities are graduating from college in numbers so much lower than kids from affluent communities. I think we’ve been looking at the solution to that as a question of cognitive skills alone: we just need to give kids more cognitive stimulation, test them better, push them harder, start them earlier. That leaves out a big part of what it takes to achieve in those circumstances, and that is these character strengths, these non-cognitive skills, that help kids make it through setbacks and achieve goals like college graduation.

On the affluent end of things, parents especially in the last 20 years have become really anxious about this sense of competition early in childhood. This idea that early childhood is the ‘rugrat race,’ as economists that I quote call it, suggests the earlier that you can get your child [academically prepared], the better they’ll do in the long run. I think the evidence is building that that’s not the case. For kids anywhere on the income spectrum, what matters most, especially early in life, is to have a strong psychological base. That comes not from the sorts of things you can learn on flash cards but from close relationships with parents and other adults.

Texans Care: So I’m hoping your book sells lots of copies here in Texas. We’re hearing from demographic experts that the central challenge for our state, if we want to have a bright future and not experience decline in the years when our kids are grown up, comes down to this issue of whether we can close some of the gaps, in achievement and other areas, for poor and low-income children. Low-income kids make up about half of all Texas kids.

You write about some interventions that really seem to work. Is it your sense then that it is possible to close these gaps, between poor and affluent kids, and if so, how?

PT: If you look at those statistics around poverty, whether in Texas or anywhere else, they can be enormously daunting because most poor kids do not have good outcomes. There’s definitely a strong correlation between an adverse environment growing up and poor outcomes. I think most of the evidence suggests that it’s getting worse. It’s getting harder to pull yourself out of poverty than it was in the past. But there’s lot of evidence from individual kids, individual families, individual schools, that is very persuasive that kids overcome poverty all the time. . . . What we need to do now, what I and other people are pushing towards, is how to systematize that.

Instead of just having a few lucky kids somehow manage to beat the odds, how can we create systems—both in terms of school systems and other systems—that can do that? And, you know, I don’t think the answers are easy. The problem is the last 10-15 years, we have been looking for the answers just in schools. We’ve had these examples of high-performing, high-poverty schools, and we’ve extrapolated from that somehow that schools alone are all that kids need to succeed.

The reality is that for kids who are in deep disadvantage, in really extreme poverty and growing up in poverty and neighborhoods and families with a lot of chaos and instability, they need more than just educational interventions. They need interventions that help support their families and help support them outside of school as well.

But I do think that there is growing evidence that when we do that, when we can find the right sorts of systems to help those kids, we can make huge strides with helping not just thousands of kids succeed, but millions of kids to succeed.

Cross-posted from Livemom.com.
Posted by: Christine Sinatra | Submit comment | Tell a friend


 

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