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

Chapter 1 introduces two individuals, Nadine Burke Harris and Elizabeth Dozier, who share a common goal despite their vastly different backgrounds. Nadine Burke Harris, raised in privilege in Palo Alto, California, became a pediatrician and opened a clinic in San Francisco’s poorest neighborhood. Elizabeth Dozier, from more modest circumstances near Chicago, pursued a career in education, eventually becoming the principal of Christian Fenger High School, in a deeply under-resourced area.

Fenger High School, located in Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood, exemplified the challenges faced by many urban schools. Despite numerous well-funded reform efforts over the years, including those from esteemed education officials and philanthropists, Fenger remained entrenched in dysfunction. Dozier, upon assuming her role as principal, implemented significant changes, including personnel replacements and a zero-tolerance policy for violence.

The pervasive threat of violence at Fenger underscored the profound challenges its students faced. Many lived in poverty, surrounded by gang activity, with a quarter of female students either pregnant or teenage mothers. Tragically, a violent incident resulting in student Derrion Albert’s death brought national attention to Fenger, highlighting the school’s struggles.

Dozier, midway through her second year as principal of Fenger High School, recognized that traditional academic approaches were insufficient to address the deep-seated issues facing her students, particularly in the aftermath of Albert’s murder. In response, she prioritized interventions targeting the trauma and stress stemming from her students’ troubled home lives. This shift led to the implementation of afterschool programs in anger management and trauma counseling, as well as intensive mentoring for at-risk students. Dozier’s perspective evolved as she started to understand the impact of family backgrounds and poverty on students’ well-being, prompting her to reevaluate her approach to addressing the multifaceted challenges at Fenger.

Burke Harris, as a pediatrician in San Francisco, also observed the toll of violence and chaos on children’s physical and emotional well-being in her community. She had studied health disparities at Harvard and diligently sought to improve the lives of children in the Bayview-Hunters Point community through initiatives such as asthma management and vaccinations. Despite these efforts, the pervasive violence and turmoil in their environments continued to damage their physical and emotional health.

It was through encountering a medical journal article about the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study that Burke Harris’s perspective began to shift. The ACE study, conducted by Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda, demonstrated a strong correlation between childhood trauma and negative adult health outcomes. The researchers sent out surveys to individuals, requesting them to recount their personal experiences in 10 distinct categories of adverse childhood experiences. These categories encompassed instances of physical and sexual abuse, as well as experiences of physical and emotional neglect. Additionally, the surveys delved into various measures of childhood dysfunction, such as having divorced or separated parents, or family members who were incarcerated, mentally ill, or struggling with addiction. Surprisingly, even among predominantly middle to upper-middle-class respondents, two-thirds reported experiencing at least one ACE, with higher ACE scores correlating with worse outcomes, illustrating the dose-response relationship between childhood trauma and negative outcomes in almost every aspect of life.

Although Anda and Felitti initially lacked comprehension of the biological processes underlying their ACE data, there is now consensus among scientists that stress is the primary mechanism through which early adversity harms developing bodies and brains. The body regulates stress through the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which is responsible for managing responses to stressors. Tough references neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers (1994), which highlights that while the stress response system evolved to handle brief and acute stresses, it is ill-equipped for modern-day chronic stressors, primarily mental ones. Overloading the HPA axis, particularly in infancy and childhood, results in severe negative effects across physical, psychological, and neurological domains.

In the early 1990s, neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen proposed the concept of allostasis, explaining how stress management leads to wear and tear on the body, known as allostatic load. The HPA axis cannot differentiate between various threats, triggering all defense mechanisms simultaneously in response to any threat. Tough compares the HPA axis to a firehouse: When activated, the HPA axis mobilizes all resources without stopping to discern which are needed—the fire trucks rush out, at full blast. This response, if left on over long periods, contributes to the body’s strain and potential breakdown under chronic stress.

Burke Harris discovered a robust association between ACE scores and academic challenges when she applied a modified version of the Felitti-Anda questionnaire to over 700 patients in her clinic. Stress researchers have also identified a biological basis for this link, particularly highlighting the impact of early stress on the prefrontal cortex, crucial for various self-regulatory functions. Consequently, children from stressful environments often struggle with concentration, impulse control, and emotional regulation. These difficulties are attributed to compromised executive functions, which are a set of advanced cognitive abilities located in the prefrontal cortex. Enhancing executive function presents a promising approach to bridging the achievement gap between disadvantaged and affluent children, given its role in managing complex information and situations.

Researchers like Michael Meaney further illuminated the role of nurturing caregiving in mitigating the effects of stress on children. His studies emphasized the importance of responsive parenting in promoting resilience and healthy development. One notable study, conducted by Meaney and his team, involved rat pups and their dams, or mothers. When lab assistants handled rat pups, it produced anxiety and a surge of stress hormones in the pups. Some dams responded by licking and grooming the pups, which counteracted the anxiety and calmed the hormonal surge. After categorizing dams into high and low licking and grooming groups (high-LG and low-LG), researchers found that high-LG offspring exhibited better maze performance, social behavior, curiosity, self-control, and overall health compared to low-LG offspring. This groundbreaking research highlighted the profound impact of nurturing caregiving on the development and well-being of offspring.

This concept resonates with attachment theory, developed in the 1950s and 1960s by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Attachment theory emphasizes the importance of responsive and nurturing caregiving in promoting secure attachment relationships between infants and their caregivers. Research has shown that infants who receive sensitive and responsive care are more likely to develop secure attachment styles, which serve as a foundation for healthy social and emotional development throughout life. This understanding underscores the critical role of nurturing relationships in buffering children from the negative effects of early adversity and promoting resilience.

Tough describes interventions that built upon these findings. Child-parent psychotherapy, developed by Alicia Lieberman, aimed to improve attachment relationships and buffer children from the effects of trauma. Another intervention, Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), developed by Mary Dozier, encouraged foster parents to respond to infants’ cues more attentively and warmly. These interventions reflected a commitment to addressing the root causes of adversity faced by children in challenging environments.

The chapter concludes with the story of Keitha, a Fenger student with a tumultuous upbringing, who benefited from the support of a mentoring program called YAP, or Youth Advocate Programs. Her journey exemplifies the potential for interventions rooted in nurturing relationships to foster resilience and promote success in the face of adversity.