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

networks.
    In preschool, two-thirds of children in the Minnesota studywho had been securely attached in infancy were categorized by their teachers as “effective” in terms of their behavior, meaning they were attentive and engaged and rarely acted out in class. Among children who had been observed to be anxiously attached a few years earlier, only one in eight was placed in the effective category; the large majority of those children were classified by their teachers as having one or more behavior problems. (The teachers didn’t know how the kids had done on the Strange Situation.) Children whose parents had been judged disengaged or emotionally unavailable in early assessments of their parenting style did the worst in preschool, and teachers recommended special education or grade retention for two-thirds of them. When teachers ranked students on indicators of dependency,90 percent of the children with an anxious-attachment history fell in the more dependent half of the class, compared with just 12 percent of children with secure histories. When teachers and other children were surveyed,the anxiously attached children were more often labeled mean, antisocial, and immature.
    When the children in the study were ten, researchers invited a randomly selected group of forty-eight students to four-week-long sessions at a summer camp, where they were closely observed and discreetly studied. Counselors (again, unaware of the students’ attachment classifications at one year) rated campers who had had secure attachment in infancy as more self-confident, more curious,and better able to deal with setbacks. The ones with anxious-attachment histories spent less time with peers, more time with the counselors, and more time alone.
    Finally, the researchers followed the children through high school, where they found that early parental care predicted which students would graduateeven more reliably than IQ or achievement-test scores. Using measures of early parenting only and ignoring the students’ own characteristics and abilities, the researchers found they could have predicted with 77 percent accuracy,when the children were not yet four years old, which ones would later drop out of high school.
    It is easy to see parallels between what Michael Meaney’s researchers found in their rat pups in Montreal and what Alan Sroufe and Byron Egeland found in the children they studied in Minnesota. In both cases, certain mothers performed certain specific idiosyncratic parenting behaviors in the earliest days of their children’s lives. And those behaviors—licking and grooming in the rats, responding sensitively to infants’ cues in the humans—seem to have had a powerful and long-lasting effect on the children’s outcomes in a variety of similar ways: the human and rat babies who received the extra dose of early care were, later on, more curious, more self-reliant, calmer, and better able to deal with obstacles. The early nurturing attention from their mothers had fostered in them a resilience that acted as a protective buffer against stress. When the regular challenges of life emerged, even years later—an open-field test, a disagreement among strong-willed kindergartners—they were able, rats and humans alike, to assert themselves, draw on reserves of self-confidence, and make their way forward.

12. Parenting Interventions
    There is a direct link between Mary Ainsworth’s research on attachment and Nadine Burke Harris’s clinic in Bayview−Hunters Point, and that link is a San Francisco psychologist named Alicia Lieberman. In the mid-1970s, Lieberman studied with Ainsworth at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It was the era when Ainsworth was conducting her first big study of parenting and attachment, and under Ainsworth’s direction, Lieberman, then a graduate student, spent long hours watching and coding videotape of new mothers interacting with their babies, looking for the small, specific examples of sensitive and