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

reliable way to measure a child’s emotional capacities. So Ainsworth invented a method to do just that, an unusual procedure called the Strange Situation. At Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, where Ainsworth was a professor, a mother would bring her twelve-month-old child into a lab set up as a playroom. After playing with her infant for a while, the mother left the room, sometimes leaving the child with a stranger, sometimes leaving him or her alone. After a brief interval, she would return. Ainsworth and her researchers observed the whole procedure through one-way mirrors, and then categorized the children’s reactions.
    Most children greeted the returning mother happily, running to her and reconnecting with her, sometimes tearfully, sometimes with joy. These children Ainsworth labeled securely attached, and in subsequent experiments over the past few decades, psychologists have come to believe that they make up about 60 percent of American children. Children who did not have a warm reunion—pretending to ignore the mother when she returned; lashing out at her; falling to the floor in a heap—were labeled anxiously attached. Ainsworth found that a child’s reaction in the Strange Situation was directly related to his parents’ degree of responsiveness in that first year of life. Parents who were attuned to their child’s mood and responsive to his cues produced securely attached children; parenting that was detached or conflicted or hostile produced anxiously attached children. And early attachment, Ainsworth said, created psychological effects that could last a lifetime.

11. Minnesota
    But Ainsworth’s contention that early attachment had long-term consequences was, at that point, just a theory. No one had figured out a reliable way to test it. And then in 1972, one of Ainsworth’s research assistants, Everett Waters, graduated from Johns Hopkins and entered the PhD program in child development at the University of Minnesota. There he met Alan Sroufe, a rising young star at the university’s Institute of Child Development. Sroufe was intrigued by what Waters told him about Ainsworth’s work, and he quickly embraced her ideas and her methods, setting up a lab with Waters where they could perform the Strange Situation test with mothers and children. Before long, the institute had become a leading center of attachment research.
    Sroufe joined forces with Byron Egeland, a psychologist at the university who had received a grant from the federal government to conduct a long-term study on low-income mothers and their children. From the local public-health clinic in Minneapolis, they recruited 267 pregnant women, all about to become first-time mothers, all with incomes below the poverty line. Eighty percent of the mothers were white, two-thirds were unmarried, and half were teenagers. Egeland and Sroufe began tracking this groupof children at birth, and they have been studying them ever since. (The subjects are now in their late thirties; both Egeland and Sroufe recently retired.) The evidence the study produced, which Egeland and Sroufe and two coauthors summarized most completely in their 2005 book The Development of the Person, stands as the fullest evaluation to date of the long-lasting effects of early parental relationships on a child’s development.
    Attachment classification, the Minnesota researchers found, was not absolute destiny—sometimes attachment relationships changed in the course of childhood, and some children with anxious attachments went on to thrive. But for most children, attachment status at one year of age, as measured by the Strange Situation and other tests, was highly predictive of a wide range of outcomes later in life. Children with secure attachment early on were more socially competent throughout their lives: better able to engage with preschool peers, better able to form close friendships in middle childhood, better able to negotiate the complex dynamics of adolescent social