Beyond Smart: How Grit, Curiosity, and Character Help Kids Succeed and Thrive

Is IQ the most important factor in a child’s success? It’s easy to assume so, given our culture’s preoccupation with test scores from kindergarten through college and beyond. There may be a straight line running from IQ to ACT performance, but groundbreaking new research by neuroscientists, psychologists, economists, and medical doctors has identified very different qualities, such as persistence, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-control, as essential for success.

The top journalist reporting on these innovative research threads is Paul Tough, who has written acclaimed articles about character and childhood in the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. His 2012 book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, synthesizes cutting-edge findings about child and adolescent success and failure. Tough uses the umbrella term “character” to incorporate what University of Chicago economist James Heckman (the key scholar in this work) calls “noncognitive skills”; or what a psychologist calls “personality traits”; or what a neuroscientist would call “executive function.”

Tough interlaces the research narrative with inspiring, moving stories of kids trying to gain traction out of poverty via education, and the adults working to help them, and he doesn’t gloss over the enormous obstacles that they all face. But he presents a new take – it’s not just impoverishment that is detrimental to child’s success; more significantly, the sheer amount of stress in these fragile, volatile environments eclipses all else. To that point, Tough cites contemporary research on the unique stresses faced by affluent youth that result in elevated levels of anxiety, depression, and substance use. In any family or neighborhood, stress and isolating home environments affect cognitive development.