Free How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough

factors on their children seemed almost to disappear. High-quality mothering, in other words, can act as a powerful buffer against the damage that adversity inflicts on a child’s stress-response system, much as the dams’ licking and grooming seemed to protect their pups.
    Gary Evans, the Cornell scientistwho tested the Simon-playing ability of the cohort of children in upstate New York he has been studying for almost two decades, conducted a similar experiment as Blair’s, though his subjects were in middle school. He collected three different kinds of data for each child: a cumulative-risk score that took into account everything from the ambient noise in a child’s home to the results of a questionnaire about family friction; an allostatic-load measure that incorporated blood pressure, the level of stress hormones in urine, and body mass index; and a rating of maternal responsiveness, which combined the child’s answers to a series of questions about his or her mother with a researcher’s observations of the mother and child playing Jenga together (another Hasbro game!). Evans found mostly what you’d expect: the higher the environmental-risk score, the higher the allostatic-load score— unless a child’s mother was particularly responsive to her child. If that was the case, the effect of all of those environmental stressors, from overcrowding to poverty to family turmoil, was almost entirely eliminated. If your mom was particularly sensitive to your emotional state during a game of Jenga, in other words, all the bad stuff you faced in life had little to no effect on your allostatic load.
    When we consider the impact of parenting on children, we tend to think that the dramatic effects are going to appear at one end or the other of the parenting-quality spectrum. A child who is physically abused is going to fare far worse, we assume, than a child who is simply ignored or discouraged. And the child of a supermom who gets lots of extra tutoring and one-on-one support is going to do way better than an average well-loved child. But what Blair’s and Evans’s research suggests is that regular good parenting—being helpful and attentive during a game of Jenga—can make a profound difference for a child’s future prospects.
    Some psychologists believe that the closest parallel to licking and grooming in humans can be found in a phenomenon called attachment. Attachment theory was developed in the 1950s and 1960sby a British psychoanalyst named John Bowlby and a researcher from the University of Toronto named Mary Ainsworth. At the time, the field of child development was dominated by behaviorists, who believed that children developed in a mechanical way, adapting their behavior according to the positive and negative reinforcement they experienced. Children’s emotional lives were not very deep, behaviorists believed; an infant’s apparent yearning for his mother was nothing more than an indication of his biological needs for nourishment and physical comfort. The dominant advice to parents in the 1950s, based on behavioral theory, was to avoid “spoiling” infants by picking them up or otherwise comforting them when they cried.
    In a series of studies in the 1960s and early 1970s, Ainsworth showed that the effect of early nurturance was exactly the opposite of what the behaviorists expected. 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 pattern continued—the children whose parents had responded most sensitively to their emotional needs as infants were the most self-reliant. Warm, sensitive parental care, Ainsworth and Bowlby contended, created a “secure base” from which a child could explore the world.
    Although psychologists in the 1960s had at their disposal many tests to evaluate the cognitive abilities of infants and children, they had no