How Children Succeed

children, often face: 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.

So when we’re looking for root causes of poverty-related underachievement, why do we tend to focus on the wrong culprits and ignore the ones that science tells us do the most damage? I think there are three reasons. The first is that the science itself is not well known or well understood, and part of why it’s not well understood is that it is dense and hard to penetrate. Any time you need to use the term hypothalamic-pituitary- adrenal in order to make your point, you’ve got trouble.

Second, those of us who don’t live in low-income homes are understandably uneasy talking about family dysfunction in those homes. It’s rude to discuss other people’s parenting practices in a critical way in public. It’s especially rude when you’re talking about parents who don’t have the material advantages that you do. And when the person making the comments is white and the parents in question are black, everyone’s anxiety level increases. This is a conversation that inevitably unearths painful issues in American politics and the American psyche.

Finally, there is the fact that the new science of adversity, in all its complexity, presents a real challenge to some deeply held political beliefs on both 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 that Keitha Jones and Kewauna Lerma and James Black possess in such impressive quantities: conscientiousness, grit, resilience, perseverance, and optimism.

Where the typical conservative argument on poverty falls short is that it often stops right there: Character matters… and that’s it. There’s not much society can do until poor people shape up and somehow develop better character. In the meantime, the rest of us are off the hook. We can lecture poor people, and we can punish them if they don’t behave the way we tell them to, but that’s where our responsibility ends.

But in fact, this science suggests a very different reality. It says that the character strengths that matter so much to young 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. That means the rest of us—society as a whole—can do an enormous amount to influence their development in children. We now know a great deal about what kind of interventions will help children develop those strengths and skills, starting at birth and going all the way through college. 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. We can argue about whether those interventions should be provided by the government or nonprofit organizations or religious institutions or a combination of the three. But what we can’t argue anymore is that there’s nothing we can do.

When advocates for a new way of thinking about children and disadvantage make their case, they often base it in economics: as a nation, we should change our approach to child development because it will save us money and improve the economy. Jack Shonkoff, the director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard, has argued persuasively that 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 has taken the math a step further, calculating that the Perry Preschool produced between seven and twelve dollars of tangible benefit to the American economy for every dollar that was invested in it.

But powerful though this economic case can be, the argument that resonates more with me is a purely personal one. When I spend time with young people growing up in adversity, I can’t help but feel two things. First, a sense of anger for what they’ve already missed. When Kewauna talks about the feeling of being warehoused in the WINGS classroom in her Minnesota middle school, watching movies and eating popcorn while the other kids learned math and metaphors, I feel the way Elizabeth Spiegel felt when she realized how little James Black had been taught about the world beyond the chessboard: I get mad on Kewauna’s behalf. She has to work twice as hard now as a result.

And to her credit, she is working twice as hard. Which leads to my second reaction: a feeling of admiration and hope when I watch young people making the difficult and often painful choice to follow a better path, to turn away from what might have seemed like their inevitable destiny. James and Keitha and Kewauna are all working far harder than I ever did as a teenager to remake themselves and improve their lives. And every day they pull themselves up one more rung on the ladder to a more successful future. But for the rest of us, it’s not enough to just applaud their efforts and hope that someday, more young people follow their lead. They did not get onto that ladder alone. They are there only because someone helped them take the first step.

Acknowledgments

Gratitude is one of the seven character strengths that the teachers at KIPP and Riverdale are trying to nurture in their students, and I’m glad to have a chance to exercise it here for a few paragraphs: not enough space to thank all the people who helped me with this book, but enough to mention at least a few.

My reporting benefited from the generosity and wisdom of many scholars and researchers, but I am especially grateful to James Heckman, Clancy Blair, Nadine Burke Harris, and Angela Duckworth, who not only shared with me their deep knowledge of their own fields but also helped me see connections that transcended traditional academic and scientific boundaries: the links between developmental psychology and labor economics; between criminology and pediatric medicine; between stress hormones and school reform.

My thanks go as well to the educators who let me watch them work and took such great care in explaining why they did what they did, especially Elizabeth Spiegel, Jeff Nelson, David Levin, Elizabeth Dozier, Dominic Randolph, Tom Brunzell, K. C. Cohen, Michele Stefl, and Lanita Reed. Steve Gates might not describe himself as an educator, but I include him in this category as well; he certainly educated me, and his guidance and generosity enriched the time I spent in Roseland.

I’m very grateful to the dozens of young people in Chicago and New York and San Francisco who told me their stories and answered my questions about their lives with honesty, insight, and grace, especially Keitha Jones, Monisha Sullivan, Thomas Gaston, James Black, and Kewauna Lerma.

My thanks to everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who made this book a reality, especially my editor, Deanne Urmy, whose contributions are apparent on every page. I’m grateful to my agent, David McCormick, for his unwavering faith in this project, and to my speaking agent, Alia Hanna Habib, for all her support, encouragement, and advice. Thanks to Emmy Liss, who provided me with research assistance; she expanded my understanding of what it means for a child to grow up in deep disadvantage. Thanks to Charles William Wilson, who was intrepid and painstaking as he fact-checked much of the manuscript. I’m grateful as well to Katherine Bradley and her colleagues at the CityBridge Foundation for their help and support in the early stages of my reporting.

I’m indebted to the friends and colleagues who read drafts and sections of this work and offered me advice, including Matt Bai and James Forman Jr., as well as two outstanding magazine editors, Vera Titunik and Daniel Zalewski, who helped turn some of my reporting for this book into articles for the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, respectively. Two more editors, both indispensable: When I could not find my way into or out of a chapter, my first call was invariably to Joel Lovell, who always had a solution. And after I finished a first draft of the book, Ira Glass guided me through some critical revisions, reading and offering advice on multiple drafts; I felt lucky to have the benefit of his keen eyes and ears.

I send heartfelt thanks to the family and friends who offered support and counsel and welcome distraction along the way, including Susan Tough, Anne Tough, Allen Tough, Jack Hitt, Michael Pollan, Ethan Watters, Ann Clarke, Matt Klam, Kira Pollack, James Ryerson, Elana James, and Ilena Silverman.

Above all, my thanks go to Paula, Ellington, and Georgie, for their help, their support, and their love. In the acknowledgments of my last book, I promised Paula that this one would be easier, and it wasn’t. But she persevered anyway, with patience and good humor and large helpings of grit. The research papers I immersed myself in while writing this book taught me a great deal about the transformative power of a family’s love—but that