How Children Succeed
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Why character, confidence, and curiosity are more important to your child’s success than academic results. The New York Times bestseller. For all fans of Oliver James or Steve Biddulph’s Raising Boys, Raising Girls, and The Complete Secrets of Happy Children.
In a world where academic success can seem all-important in deciding our children’s success in adult life, Paul Tough sees things very differently.
Instead of fixating on grades and exams, he argues that we, as parents, should be paying more attention to our children’s characters.
Inner resilience, a sense of curiosity, the hidden power of confidence - these are the most important things we can teach our children, because it is these qualities that will enable them to live happy, fulfilled and successful lives.
In this personal, thought-provoking and timely book, Paul Tough offers a clarion call to parents who are seeking to unlock their child’s true potential – and ensure they really succeed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This American Life contributor Tough (Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America) tackles new theories on childhood education with a compelling style that weaves in personal details about his own child and childhood. Personal narratives of administrators, teachers, students, single mothers, and scientists lend support to the extensive scientific studies Tough uses to discuss a new, character-based learning approach. While traditional education relies heavily on memorization, new research conducted by James Heckman suggests that the conventional wisdom represented by those third-grade multiplication tables has failed some of our most vulnerable students. Tough takes the reader through experiments that studied childhood nurture, or attachment theory, to report cards that featured character strength assessments (measuring "grit," gratitude, optimism, curiosity, self-control, zest, and social intelligence). Focused on schools in Chicago and New York, Tough explores the effects of racial and socioeconomic divides through the narratives of survivors of an outdated system. The ultimate lesson of Tough's quest to explain a new wave of educational theories is that character strengths make up perhaps the single most compelling element of a child's education, and these traits are rooted deep within the chemistry of the brain. Tough believes that it is society's responsibility to provide those transformative experiences that will create its most productive future members.
