Alexina Laliberte

Mrs. Thomas
UWRT 1101-103
10/10/14

How Children Succeed Presented in Four Genres

How do children succeed and what makes them succeed? Merriam-Webster Dictionary
defines success in three ways- 1. a degree or measure of succeeding, 2. a favorable or desired
outcome; the correct or desired result of an attempt, and 3. the attainment of wealth, favor, or
eminence. This definition is true as it is the literal definition of success, but there is no true
definition for success because success is different for each person. This book explores the work
of researchers and educators who, for the first time, are using scientific tools to look into the
mysteries of character. Through the stories of the children they are trying to help, Paul Tough,
the author, looks into the connection between childhood stresses and future successes. Tough
reveals the ways in which parents both do and do not prepare their children for the future. To me,
this topic couldn't be more fitting for an elementary education major and I am excited to share
my findings.
The Original Book Cover (at top)

The background of the book cover is a solid white color with the title of the book in a
solid black color. In the foreground, the secondary title of the book and authors information are
written in black and red inside of a text box. Behind that, there are 5 pencils- one red, one
orange, one yellow, one green, and one blue. The colors of the pencils are of that of the
simplified rainbow, which is something that children learn about in elementary school, which is
the foundation of their success. All of the pencils, except the blue one, are broken. This blue,
fully-sharpened pencil resembles the successful child that goes above and beyond all of the
others. The simplicity and cleanliness of the book cover is attractive to many people, especially
researchers- that the book includes- who usually like to keep things very symmetrical and
organized.

New York Times Book Review

After reading How Children Succeed, I did some further research which led me to a book
review in the New York Times by a woman named Anne Murphy Paul. Anne Murphy Paul is an
author, magazine journalist, consultant, and a speaker who helps people understand how we
learn and how we can do it better. She graduated from Yale University and from the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism. She is a former senior editor at Psychology Today
magazine, she has been awarded with the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health
Journalism. Her writing has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the New York
Times Book Review (this one), Slate, Discover, etc. She is the author of Origins: How the Nine
Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives and The Cult of Personality: How Personality
Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and
Misunderstand Ourselves. Of all of the book reviews I could have chosen, I figured that this
review would be the most accurate due to the reviewers credibility on multiple levels.

This book review includes multiple direct quotes from the book with Anne Murphys
reflections and research findings following them. She also refers back to some of Toughs
findings in his previous book, Whatever It Takes, where he followed educator Geoffrey
Canadas efforts to turn his organization, the Harlem Childrens Zone, into a system that would
carry the neighborhoods children from infancy to adulthood. She compares his large scale view
of success in this story to his small stories of success in How Children Succeed. All in all, the
conclusion is made that the children experience the effects of the parents choices, and lack
thereof, the greatest.
She states in her review that although the title How Children Succeed makes the book
sound like an instruction manual for parents, its really a guide to the ironies and perversities of
income inequality in America. She talks about Toughs reflection of dropping out of college and
that he was extremely lucky to be able to experience college and realize that it wasn't meant for
him and still be successful. In relation to the fact that fewer and fewer young people are getting
the character-building combination of support and autonomy that Tough was fortunate enough
to receive, she ends her book review with a very important and insightful question, which is the
question I want to leave the reader with as well. For who will have the conscientiousness, the
persistence, and the grit to change it?

A Tweet from twitter.com

The tweet from Twitter user Paul Tough (@paultough) includes a quote from an article
and the link to the article. The tweet reads, We cant pretend that school preparation begins at
age 4. Four is better than 5, but zero is far better than 4. nyti.ms/1qxwGOm The author of the
tweet just so happens to be Paul Tough the author of How Children Succeed.
This tweet relates to his book due to the fact that his research brought him to the
realization that we have to be preparing our children for success even before school so that they

can succeed in and beyond school. The link brings you to a New York Times article with
research done by Clare Huntington, a law professor at Fordham University. She talks about how
families are the ultimate pre-pre-school and how research in neuroscience and other fields has
established that parents and caregivers provide a crucial foundation during the first few years of
life, but public policies make it much harder for families, especially families living in poverty, to
lay this foundation. The tweet itself is a tweet that gets me personally intrigued. In my opinion,
tweets that have only a link to an article are annoying. But the fact that Tough included a direct
quote from the article, a catchy one I might add, makes me want to click the link and read the
words surrounding the quote.

Academic piece: Which children succeed and why. by Leon Feinstein

I am going to first preface this by stating that this is an article based on the keys to
success for British school-children. Although this article is not based on American children, like
How Children Succeed is, the information provided in this article is applicable and useful. Leon
Feinstein is a researcher at the Centre for Economic Performance and University College
London. Feinstein, based on his research, discusses how parental involvement determines the
level of the childs success. It includes a hypothesis, an experiment that confirms the hypothesis,
and an explanation of it all.
In 1997, Feinstein and Symons looks at the determination of educational outcomes.
Teachers were asked to assess parental interest in education of their children at 7, 11, and 16
years old. Early users of this data were concerned that parents may become more interested, or
fake being interested, in the performance of their child, making the data invalid. This data gave
Feinstein and Symons the ability to look at the interest of parents as their children got older. The
study suggested that there is in fact a direct correlation with parental interest and the childs

success rather than direct effects of social class. The quote, Although parental interest in
education tends to be much greater for parents in professional occupations, it is the interest
that explains educational performance... rather than the social group, is a conclusion of the
findings based on the experiment.