Licking and Grooming - Not just for Rats - PART TWO

So summer is here and the days are crazy…. and not nearly as lazy as I would like.  But I did finish the book (Paul Tough's How Children Succeed - Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character) whose beginning pages inspired the last Licking and Grooming post.

I am always looking for examples of kids (or adults for that matter)  displaying strong character.  I enjoy conversing about what it is, exactly.  I am fascinated with how we teach it …. or don't.  I am dismayed that there are so few opportunities for our young people to see it modeled by the celebrities or government leaders or corporate heads who grab the headlines. I wonder why we don't  talk about it more.  Is it something we shy away from because we feel there is a moral component to it that should be left to our religious institutions?  Or perhaps we fear it comes laden with judgement about how to best parent?

So I was absorbed in  Paul Tough's book and it  didn't disappoint.  But I have to admit I was hoping for an answer to fix the problems that seem so rampant in our country ….. simple ways we could help kids develop Character - especially those around us who grow up in poverty and within families where survival takes precedence over and time away from nurturing - licking and grooming.  And they are there, but it is NOT simple.

 on page 191 of his book Paul Tough asks ...
       What can we as a country do to significantly improve the life chances of millions of poor children?
(I think the guy's last name is apropos)

And this question comes after he has shared the daunting statistics about the number of people in poverty (40% of American families according to our country's Education Department)  and the dysfunctional pipeline that those living in poverty must maneuver …. overcrowded medicaid clinics, social service and child-welfare offices and hospital ER clinics.   A school system that often steers them into special ed, remedial classes or alternative schools.  And outside school?  A broken system of foster homes, juvenile detention and probation officers.  In Tough's words, "an extremely expensive system, wildly inefficient and has a low success rate."

So I was getting rather dismayed.  Especially since so much of my work as an educator has been with middle school and high school age young people and if they missed out on Licking and Grooming and nurturing (i.e. support) when they were young, are they doomed to be those 'throw-away kids'?   And to make things worse,  Tough suggests one way of looking at character is how it "functions as a substitute for the social safety net that students who come from [affluence] enjoy - the support from their families and schools and culture that protects them from the consequences of occasional detours …  mistakes and bad decisions."  He also says that  low income kids need more grit, more social intelligence, more self control than wealthier kids.  CRAP ---- there is NOTHING SIMPLE ABOUT THIS!

At this point, I came close to stashing the book in the bedside drawer and getting out a steamy summer romance novel.  After all, I am only one older retired lady without an endless cash stream!

But then I went back to my dog-eared pages and re-read the highlights….

• about how researchers and school-reformers have found that being a successful human is not just about IQ and doing well on tests and that the most critical missing piece is character.
• that many people think character is something innate …a core set of attributes, but researchers (Seligman and Peterson) suggest character skills can be learned, practiced and taught at any age.
• that a researcher at Penn (Duckworth) did a study where she found that students' self-discipline scores from the previous fall were better predictors of their final GPAs than their IQ scores.
• that there are schools where students actually accumulate a CPA (character point average) along with their GPA (Kipp).   Hmmm --- what could that mean for those hiring?

So I came away grateful for this book and for all the schools and researchers who are studying this and making concrete and quantifiable what has been so abstract.  I am grateful for the new and hard work that is being done to help kids succeed.

But I still wonder …. what can I do?  Especially to support those kids who fall below the poverty line and who might not have had that L an G nurturing when they were young.    Paul Tough has an answer for me ….

       "…when children reach early adolescence, what motivates them most effectively isn't licking and grooming-style care but a very different kind of attention….the unexpected experience of someone taking them seriously, believing in their abilities, and challenging them to improve themselves."

Can't we all do that?  In big or little ways, can't we seek out kids who need us to do this for and with them?

 It is simple after all.

Licking and Grooming....Not just for Rats!

I am going to use Paul Tough's new book HOW CHILDREN SUCCEED, Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character  as the reason why this blog post is late.

I am hooked on every word!  It is not a long book, but it is thick with data, science, long term studies and provocative thought.

It seems rather ironic that I am reading it just when so many school kids and teachers are hunkered down under the pressure of state and federally mandated testing because this book.... and here I paraphrase the book jacket ...... 'challenges the story we usually tell about childhood .... that success comes to those who score highest on tests.  In How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues that the qualities that matter have more to do with character skills like perseverance, curiosity, optimism, and self-control.'

Reading that alone made me want to shout AMEN. During my career in the classroom we knew (but only anecdotally and subjectively) about the need to develop character right alongside teaching math, history, geography and the five paragraph essay ... but to think that this book might offer proof through careful scientific data and long term study, plus ways to use this knowledge to transform young people's lives, our schools, our parenting and especially to improve the lives of children growing up in poverty - this has me stoked...and hooked.  At least that's what I hope this book is going to tell us....but I'm not there yet - only about sixty fascinating, underlined, dog-eared pages into it.

 I expect several blog posts to bubble up out of all the wonderings this powerful book is bringing up for me.  Here is the first one.....

We were on a family vacation recently (that, more likely, is the real reason for the tardy blog post).  We have a wonderful new baby grandson and on this trip I watched my daughter in law .... at every feeding, diaper change, or free moment ... kiss and nuzzle his sweet two month old face, pick at every piece of lint or dry skin on his round growing body, rub his soft bald head, or simply hold those little fingers that wrapped around hers.  Now it pains me to put our wonderful cherubic grandchildren (or my lovely DIL)  in the same paragraph with rats but Paul Tough talks in this book about studies with rats (led by neuroscientist, Michael Meany) done to expand our understanding of the relationship between parenting and childhood stress. Rat mothers (dams) were observed licking and grooming their offspring (pups) when the pups were returned to the cage following testing, in order to lower the stress hormones that become elevated when they are out of the cage exposed to the rigors of the tests and human handling.  Of course, they observed rat moms who were big L and G-ers (as the scientists termed them) and rat moms who weren't as much. So they decided to set up regular observations to keep score of the  L and G time and then to see if there were any long-term effects of these parenting behaviors on the young rats.

When the rat 'pups' were fully grown, the researchers gave them a series of tests that compared the offspring of the high LG (licked and groomed)  rats with the low LG rats.  The specifics in the book are fascinating but suffice it to say, that on each test the high LG offspring excelled - better at mazes, more social, more curious, less aggressive, healthier, lower levels of stress hormones, more self-control, lived longer.   AND ...  the L and G did not have to come just from the biological mother to produce those effects!

Now perhaps this is more of a "DUH" than an "A-HA" for most, and daunting to anyone trying to assist and improve the lives of disadvantaged children, but here is what Paul Tough says....

           "We now know that early stress and adversity can literally get under a child's skin, where it can cause damage that lasts a lifetime.  But there is also some positive news in this research. It turns out that there is a particularly effective antidote to the ill effects of early stress, and it comes not from pharmaceutical companies or early-childhood educators but from parents.  Parents and other caregivers who are able to form close, nurturing relationships with their children can foster resilience in them that protects them from many of the worst effects of a harsh early environment.  This message can sound a bit warm and fuzzy, but it is rooted in cold, hard science.  The effect of good parenting is not just emotional or psychological, the neuroscientists say, it is biochemical."

Today I am wondering how we as a society can help provide this necessary nurturing to all children.