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

_______ are _______ of thinking of chess as an almost exclusively cognitive pursuit, where moves are chosen and positions understood only on the basis of mental patterns and inferences." In reality, he wrote, if you want to become a great chess player, or even a good one, "your ability to recognize and utilize your emotions is every bit as important as the way you think."

"They, guilty

_______ school grades reveal much more than mastery of content. They reveal qualities of motivation and perseverance—as well as the presence of good _______ habits and time management skills—that tell us a great deal about the chances that a student will complete a college program."

"high, study

The typical contemporary Harvard undergraduate, Kwak wrote, _______ _______ more by fear of not being a success than by a concrete desire to do anything in particular." The postcollege choices of Ivy League students, he explained, "are motivated by two main decision rules: (1) close down as few options as possible; and (2) only do things that increase the possibility of future overachievement."

"is, driven

Executive functions, as we now understand them, are a collection of higher-order mental abilities; Jack Shonkoff, the head of the _______ on the Developing Child at Harvard University, has compared them to a team of air traffic controllers overseeing the functions of the brain. Most broadly, they refer to the ability to deal with confusing and _______ situations and information. One famous test of executive-function ability is called the Stroop test. You see the word red written in green letters, and someone asks you what color that word is. It takes some effort to stop yourself from saying red, and the skills you're drawing on when you resist that impulse are executive functions. And those skills are especially valuable in school. We're

Center, unpredictable

Big _______ conscientiousness was the trait that best predicted workplace success.

Five

Two years before Ellington's birth, the Kumon chain of tutoring centers opened New York City's first _______ Kumon franchise, where children as young as two spent their mornings filling out worksheets and completing drills on letter and number recognition.

Junior

What _______ success suggests, though, is that when children reach early adolescence, what motivates them most effectively isn't licking and grooming-style _______ but a very different kind of attention. Perhaps what pushes middle-school students to concentrate and practice as maniacally as Spiegel's chess players do is the unexpected experience of someone taking them seriously, believing in their abilities, and challenging them to improve themselves.

Spiegel's, care

aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills—the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests, including the _______ to recognize _______ and words, to calculate, to detect patterns—and that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.

abilities, letters

"it is crucial to distinguish between _______ something and 'choosing' it." Decide that you want to become world _______, Rowson explained, and you will inevitably fail to put in the necessary hard work. You will not only not become world champion but also have the unpleasant experience of falling short of a desired goal, with all the attendant disappointment and regret. If, however, you choose to become world champion (as Kasparov did at a young age), then you will "reveal your choice through your behavior and your determination. Every action says, 'This is who I am.'"

champion, 'wanting'

the best way for a young person to build _______ is for him to attempt something where there is a real and serious possibility of failure. In a high-risk endeavor, whether it's in business or athletics or the arts, you are more likely to experience _______ defeat than in a low-risk one—but you're also more likely to achieve real and original success.

character, colossal

Parents who were attuned to their child's mood and responsive to his cues produced securely attached _______; parenting that was detached or conflicted or hostile produced anxiously attached children.

children

First, as much as possible, you protect him from serious trauma and _______ stress; then, even more _______, you provide him with a secure, nurturing relationship with at least one parent and ideally two. That's not the whole secret of success, but it is a big, big part of it.

chronic, important

When you're making rules for yourself, Kessler writes, you're enlisting the prefrontal _______ as your partner against the more reflexive, appetite-driven parts of your brain. Rules, Kessler points out, are not the same as willpower. They are a metacognitive substitute for willpower. By making yourself a rule ("I never eat fried dumplings"), you can sidestep the painful internal conflict between your desire for fried foods and your willful determination to resist them. Rules, Kessler explains, "provide structure, preparing us for _______ with tempting stimuli and redirecting our attention elsewhere."

cortex, encounters

And after three years of careful analysis, Heckman and his researchers were able to ascertain that those noncognitive factors, such as _______, self-control, and social fluidity, were responsible for as much as two-thirds of the total benefit that Perry gave its students.

curiosity

High-quality mothering, in other words, can act as a powerful buffer against the _______ that adversity inflicts on a child's stress-response system, much as the dams' licking and grooming seemed to protect their pups.

damage

the key channel through which early adversity causes _______ to developing bodies and brains is stress.

damage

infants absorb language from their parents not just in _______ vocabulary-building moments but at every moment.

dedicated

What matters most in a child's _______ment, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her _______ in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.

develop, brain

The _______ Curve carried within it a very important new observation, which was that academic grades and achievement-test results are very good predictors of all kinds of outcomes in life: not just how far you'll go in school and how much you'll earn when you get out, but also whether you'll commit crimes, whether you'll take drugs, whether you'll get married, and whether you'll get _______. What The Bell Curve showed was that kids who do well in school tend to do well in life, whether or not they come from poverty.

divorced, Bell

Over the past couple of decades, a consensus has _______ among personality psychologists that the most effective way to analyze the human personality is to consider it along five dimensions, known as the Big Five: agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, and conscientiousness.

emerged

If you believe that your _______ mission or your job as a teacher is simply to convey information, then it probably doesn't seem necessary to subject your students to that kind of rigorous self-analysis. But if you're trying to help them change their character, then conveying information isn't _______.

enough, school's

The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in _______ _______ generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments, and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school. When you're overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses and distracted by negative feelings, it's hard to learn the alphabet.

environments, stressful

prefrontal cortex known as _______ functions. In wealthy school districts, executive function has become the new educational catch phrase, the most recent thing to _______ and diagnose. But among scientists who study children in poverty, executive functions are a newly attractive field for another reason: improving executive function seems like a potentially promising vehicle for narrowing the achievement gap between poor kids and middle-class kids.

evaluate, executive

analyzed two separate neurological systems that develop in childhood and early adulthood that together have a profound effect on the lives of adolescents. The problem is, these two systems are not well aligned. The first, called the _______ processing system, makes you more sensation seeking, more emotionally reactive, more attentive to social information. (If you've ever been a teenager, this may sound familiar.) The second, called the cognitive control system, allows you to regulate all those urges. The reason the teenage years have always been such a perilous time, Steinberg says, is that the incentive processing system reaches its full power in early adolescence while the cognitive control system doesn't _______ maturing until you're in your twenties. So for a few wild years, we are all madly processing incentives without a corresponding control system to keep our behavior in check.

finish, incentive

Yes, they said, those first few years are critically important in the development of a child's brain. But the most significant skills he is acquiring during those years aren't ones that can be taught with _______.

flashcards

Those traits—an inclination to persist at a boring and often unrewarding task; the ability to delay gratification; the tendency to follow through on a plan—also turned out to be valuable in college, in the workplace, and in life _______.

generally

The students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled _______ at KIPP. Instead, they seemed to be the ones who possessed certain other _______, skills like optimism and resilience and social agility. They were the students who were able to recover from bad grades and resolve to do better next time; who could bounce back from unhappy breakups or fights with their parents; who could persuade professors to give them extra help after class; who could resist the urge to go out to the movies and instead stay home and study.

gifts, academically

Using gene-sequencing technology, Meaney's team was able to establish which part of a pup's genome got "switched on" by licking and grooming, and it turned out to be the precise segment that controlled the way the rat's _______ would process stress hormones in _______.

hippocampus, adulthood

Compared to people with no _______ of ACEs, people with ACE scores of 4 or higher were twice as likely to smoke, seven _______ more likely to be alcoholics, and seven times more likely to have had sex before age fifteen. They were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with cancer, twice as likely to have heart disease, twice as likely to have liver disease, four times as likely to suffer from emphysema or chronic bronchitis. On some charts, the slopes were especially steep: adults with an ACE score above 6 were thirty times more likely to have attempted suicide than those with an ACE score of 0. And men with an ACE score above 5 were forty-six times more likely to have injected drugs than men with no history of ACEs.

history, times

University of California found that students today spend _______ than thirteen _______ a week studying, while they spend twelve hours hanging out with friends, fourteen hours consuming entertainment and pursuing various hobbies, eleven hours using "computers for fun," and six hours exercising.

hours, fewer

that students' mindsets predict their academic trajectories: those who believe that people can _______ their intelligence actually do improve their grades.

improve

misguided." Rowson has argued that the most important talents in chess are not _______ at all; they are psychological and emotional.

intellectual

American w_______h a BA can now expect to _______ 83 percent more than an American with only a high-school diploma. This college-graduate wage premium, as economists call it, is among the highest in the developed world, and it has risen sharply since 1980, when American college graduates earned just 40 percent more than high-school graduates. As Goldin and Katz put it, a young American today who is able to complete college but does not do so "is leaving large amounts of money lying on the street."

it, earn

the _______-stakes, low-reward test that predicts how well someone is going to do in life. They may not have been low in IQ, but they were low in whatever quality it is that makes a person try hard on an IQ test without any obvious incentive. And what Segal's research shows is that that is a very valuable quality to possess.

low, lowreward

Ellington grew older, though, I found, as countless parents had found before _______, that he needed something more than love and hugs. He also needed discipline, rules, limits; someone to say no. And what he needed more than anything was some child-size _______, a chance to fall down and get back up on his own, without help.

me, adversity

the most fruitful time to transform pessimistic children into optimistic ones was "before puberty, but late enough in childhood so that they are _______ (capable of thinking about thinking)"—in

metacognitive

If you give a person a subtle psychological cue having to do with his group identity before a test of intellectual or physical ability, Steele _______, you can have a major effect on how well he performs. Researchers have since demonstrated this effect in countless different settings. When white students at Princeton were told before trying a ten-hole mini golf course that it was a test of _______ ability in sports (which they feared they didn't possess), they scored four strokes worse than a similar group of white students who were told it was a test of their ability to think strategically (which they were confident they did possess).

natural, showed

Most early-childhood classrooms in the United States today are designed to develop in children a _______ of specific pre-academic skills, mostly related to deciphering text and manipulating _______. Tools of the Mind, by contrast, doesn't focus much on reading and math abilities. Instead, all of its interventions are intended to help children learn a different kind of skill: controlling their impulses, staying focused on the task at hand, avoiding distractions and mental traps, managing their emotions, organizing their thoughts. The founders of Tools of the Mind believe that these skills, which they group together under the rubric self-regulation, will do more to lead to positive outcomes for their students, in

numbers, set

Babies whose parents responded readily and fully to their cries in the first months of life were, at one year, more independent and intrepid than babies whose parents had ignored their cries. In preschool, the _______ continued—the children whose parents had responded most sensitively to their emotional needs as infants were the most self-reliant. Warm, sensitive _______ care, Ainsworth and Bowlby contended, created a "secure base" from which a child could explore the world. Although

pattern, parental

our stress-response system, like that of all mammals, evolved to react to brief and acute stresses. That worked well when humans were out on the savanna running from predators. But modern humans rarely have to contend with lion _______. Instead, most of our stress today comes from mental processes: from worrying about things. And the HPA axis isn't designed to handle that kind of stress. We "activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies," Sapolsky writes, "but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions."

promotions", attacks

college-graduation _______ was the highest in the world, more than twice as high as the average rate among developed countries.

rate

Although the human stress-response system is highly complex in design, in practice it has all the subtlety of a croquet mallet. Depending on what kind of stress you experience, the ideal response might come from one of any number of defense mechanisms. If you're about to _______ a flesh wound, for instance, then it would be a good idea for your immune system to start producing copious antibodies. If you need to run away from an attacker, you want your heart rate and blood pressure to elevate. But the HPA axis can't distinguish between different types of _______, so it activates every defense, all at once, in response to any threat. Unfortunately, this means you often experience stress responses that are not at all helpful—like when you need to speak before an audience, and suddenly your mouth goes dry. Your HPA axis, sensing danger, is conserving fluids, preparing to ward off an attack. And you're standing there looking for a glass of water and swallowing hard.

receive, threat

Was it better to spend your childhood, or your life, a little bit interested in a lot of things (as I tend to be), or a lot interested in one thing? Spiegel and I often debated this question, and I have to admit, she made a convincing case for the benefits of single-minded devotion—a case, in fact, that reminded me very much of Angela Duckworth's definition of grit: self-discipline wedded to a dedicated pursuit of a goal. "I think it's really liberating for kids to understand what it's like to be passionate about something," Spiegel explained one day at a tournament. "They're having momentous experiences that they'll always _______. I think the worst thing is you look back on your childhood and it's one blur of sitting in class and being bored and coming home and watching TV. At least when the kids on the _______ team look back, they'll have the nationals to remember, or one great game they played, or a moment when they were full of adrenaline and trying their hardest."

remember, chess

The reason that researchers who care about the gap between rich and poor are so excited about executive functions is that these _______ are not only highly predictive of success; they are also quite malleable, much more so than other cognitive skills. The prefrontal cortex is more _______ to intervention than other parts of the brain, and it stays flexible well into adolescence and early adulthood.

responsive, skills

Because in high _______, college, and the workplace, life is filled with tasks where working memory is crucial to success.

school

she found a disturbingly powerful correlation between ACE scores and problems in _______. Among her patients with an ACE score of 0, just 3 percent had been identified as having learning or _______ problems. Among patients with an ACE score of 4 or higher, the figure was 51 percent.

school, behavioral

84 percent of the detainees had experienced two or more serious childhood traumas and that the majority had experienced six or more. Three-quarters of them had witnessed someone being killed or _______ injured. More than 40 percent of the girls had been sexually _______ as children. More than half of the boys said that at least once, they had been in situations so perilous that they thought they or people close to them were about to die or be badly wounded. And these repeated traumas, not surprisingly, had had a devastating effect on the detainees' mental health:

seriously, abused

The adversity these patients had experienced in childhood was making them _______ through a pathway that had nothing to do with behavior.

sick

Every time the alarm went off, her stress-response _______ sent out all the trucks, sirens blaring. The firefighters smashed in some windows and soaked some carpets, and by the time Monisha turned eighteen, her biggest problem wasn't the threats that she faced from the world around her. It was the damage the firefighters had done.

stressresponse, system

The correlations between the children's _______ wait times and their later academic success turned out to be _______. Children who had been able to wait for fifteen minutes for their treat had SAT scores that were, on average, 210 points higher than those of children who had rung the bell after thirty seconds.

striking, marshmallow

Pure IQ is stubbornly resistant to improvement after about age eight. But executive functions and the ability to handle stress and manage _______ emotions can be improved, sometimes dramatically, well into adolescence and even adulthood.

strong

As the wage premium paid to college graduates increased, high-school students voiced an increasing desire to graduate from college—between 1980 and 2002, the percentage of American tenth-graders who said they wanted to _______ at least a BA doubled, from 40 percent to 80 percent.

tenthgraders, obtain

When _______ a theory, however large or small, an individual doesn't instinctively look for evidence that contradicts it; he looks for data that prove him right, a tendency known as confirmation bias. That tendency and the ability to overcome it turn out to be _______ elements in chess success. In 1960,

testing, crucial

Pessimists, Seligman wrote, tend to react to negative events by explaining them as permanent, personal, and pervasive. (Seligman calls these "the three P's.") Failed a test? It's not because you didn't prepare well; it's because you're stupid. If you get turned down for a date, there's no point in asking someone else; you're simply unlovable. Optimists, by contrast, _______ for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and as a result, in the face of a setback, they're more likely to pick _______ up and try again.

themselves, look

Wealthy parents today, she argues, are more likely than others to be emotionally distant from their children while at the same _______ insisting on high levels of achievement, a potentially toxic blend of influences that can create "intense feelings

time

When Burke Harris read the paper, she _______ me, something clicked: "The clouds parted," she said with a smile. "Angels sang. It was like that scene at the end of The Matrix where Neo can see the whole universe bending and changing." Beginning in 1995, _______ enrolled in

told, patients

Two of the most important executive functions are cognitive flexibility and cognitive self-control. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to see alternative _______ to problems, to think outside the box, to negotiate _______ situations. Cognitive self-control is the ability to inhibit an instinctive or habitual response and substitute a more effective, less obvious one. Both

unfamiliar, solutions

too much self-control could be just as big a problem as too little. Overcontrolled people are "excessively constrained," Block and two colleagues wrote in one _______. They "have difficulty making decisions [and] may _______ delay gratification or deny themselves pleasure." According to these researchers, conscientious people are classic squares: they're compulsive, anxious, and repressed.

unnecessarily, paper

A more accurate allostatic-load index would include not just blood pressure and heart rate but other stress-sensitive measures: levels of cholesterol and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (a leading marker for cardiovascular disease); readings of cortisol and other stress hormones in the _______ and of _______ and insulin and lipids in the bloodstream. Seeman and McEwen have shown that a complex index including all those values would be a much more reliable indicator of future medical risk than blood pressure or any other single-factor measure in use today.

urine, glucose

It turns out that there is a particularly effective antidote to the ill effects of early stress, and it comes not from pharmaceutical companies or early-childhood educators but from parents. Parents and other caregivers who are able to form close, nurturing relationships with their children can foster resilience in them that protects them from many of the worst effects of a harsh early environment. This message can sound a bit _______ and fuzzy, but it is rooted in cold, _______ science. The effect of good parenting is not just emotional or psychological, the neuroscientists say; it is biochemical.

warm, hard

It _______, in other words, a classic quarrel between boys on the cusp of adolescence: impulsive, awash in hormones, intensely moralistic, somewhat nonsensical.

was

To succeed, you need more grit, more social intelligence, more self-control than _______ kids.

wealthier

mechanics of achievement into two separate dimensions: motivation and volition. Each one, she says, is necessary to achieve long-term goals, but neither is sufficient alone. Most of us are familiar with the experience of possessing motivation but lacking volition: You can be extremely motivated to lose weight, for _______, but unless you have the volition—the _______, the self-control—to put down the cherry Danish and pick up the free weights, you're not going to succeed.

willpower, example