46: Helping Children Succeed in School and in Life

Helping Children Succeed, What Works and Why. His previous book, How Children Succeed Great Curiosity in The Hidden Power Character has spent more than a year on the New York Times hardcover and paperback bestseller lists. His first book, Whatever It Takes Jeffrey Conquest to Change Haarlem and America, was published in two thousand and eight. He's a contributing writer to The New York Times magazine, where he has written

extensively about education, parenting, poverty, and politics. His ring has also appeared to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and GQ, and the op ed page of The New York Times. Thanks Paul for chatting with me today. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's exciting to chat with you. These issues are being heavily discussed all throughout education right now, so you're kind of on the forefront of some really hotly debated and important issues. Good. Yeah, I think so too.

It's stuff I think we're all trying to figure out how. The answers aren't easy. They're not easy or obvious. Absolutely, so a common theme of all of your work seems to be how we can help children in adversity transcend to their difficult circumstances. Would you say that's a fair sort of yes. I'd say that's my central goal is to try to figure out strategies to do that. And I might even have just quoted you when I say that,

How did you get interested in this topic? For me, certainly as a journalist, it started with my book about Jeffrey Canada. So it was thirteen years ago this summer that I went up to one hundred and twenty fifth Street, when I was working as an editor at the New York Times magazine, had met jeff and asked to write this article about him for the Times magazine. That took me a year to do, and then that turned into a five year book project which ended up with whatever

it takes. And usually, you know, if I take on some a journalistic project for anywhere near that long, Like at the end, I feel kind of bored by the subject.

I feel like I know in every possible angle, and it's just never happened to me with this, this particular question, this question of what it is that adversity does to kids and why it makes them difficult to why it makes it difficult for them to succeed in school and outside of school, how you know, everything from the neuroscience to the sociology to the politics that surrounds that question.

To me, it's just it's the big one, and I feel like I understand some answers better than I did in two thousand and three, but there's still a lot about it that, you know, frustrates and fascinates me. Yeah, it is endlessly fascinating this topic, and the question of adversity is it's not an issue that's going to go away anytime soon. How much some of these issues you study apply to upper class students lot so in How Children Succeed I wrote explicitly about well off kids and

private school kids. Did some reporting at Riverdale country School in New York City, And yeah, I think there is a lot about this, you know, this question of knowing how to manage failure being this important process in kids sort of developing the non cognitive capacities that they need to succeed, and that what parents and teachers and coaches are doing at their best is helping kids learn how to manage those moments of adversity, those moments of failure.

And I think we have challenges in that dimension, both at the high end and the low end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Have done a lot of speaking now at independent schools, and this is a real anxiety I think among affluent parents for good reason. But in this new book and helping Children Succeed, while I care about the struggles of well off kids, what really motivates me is the struggles of kids who are growing up in poverty or other forms of adversity. And so that's what I

really wanted to focus in on. And I felt after How Children Succeed came out that I was hearing from a lot of educators or mentors, pediatricians, people who are working directly with kids growing up in poverty who needed help, you know who just just felt like overwhelmed by the work that they were doing and intrigued by the research that I was writing about, but that they didn't they didn't feel like there were clear enough answers and strategies in that research or certainly in my book to tell

them what to do tomorrow morning to help those kids succeed. So that was really my goal with this book. Sure, and used a phrase that don't want to unpack this a little bit. You said, noncognitive capacities. And we fluctuate in our field between what in the world we call these things. Yeah, I mean depending on our mood, you know. So it might be like if we didn't have a good meal, we'll say traits, Like if we feel really happy, we'll say like strengths, you know, character strengths. What are

these things? Are they personality traits? Are they of mindsets and attitudes? You know? Cayle duc I read an article once she says we don't focus enough on mid level personality traits, which are sets of mindsets and attitudes, And it seems like in reading your book, you kind of place these things at the mid level set of personality.

Tell me more what you mean by mid level so you have the big five traits of personality that are at the top of the hierarchy, things like conscientiousness, agreeableness, extra version, openness to experience, and neuroticism. Actually there's actually in the hierarchy, there's two higher above that, which is just avoidance and engagement. Okay, but it's all hierarchy. And so if you can go under each one of these personality traits and you get what are mid level facets.

So under conscientiousness there's a lot more specific things like resiliency and perseverance and consistency of interest and grit. Grit.

Angela Duckworth replaced grit as a facet of conscientiousness. Got Yeah, I've read an article once where Kyle Deweck has made that argument that we don't focus as much attention on a middle We focus too much on these big five, you know, just saying conscientiousness, and there's a more granular level which really more to like she would argue, mind a set of mindsets and attitudes and things, And in your book, it seems like that's how you want to

conceptualize it as well. Is that right? Yeah? I mean, so I don't that hierarchy is not something that I've thought about a lot, So I don't know if I can comment in a helpful way on sort of where

on that hierarchy. I think these exist for me. I feel like what I was surprised by in the rethinking that went into this book was that, you know, there's been a lot of debate about the word non cognitive in non cognitive skills, and maybe there isn't he sort of isn't debate, like everyone agrees it's a terrible word because totally cognitive, and yet you know, we keep using that word. But the word that I actually found that

I was wanting to challenge more was the skills. So I talked a lot and I wrote a lot in

How Children Succeed about how noncognitive skills. That's a phrase that James Heckman, the economist, uses a lot, and I was following his lead and a lot of what I wrote, And I think that that model, that paradigm of skill development is one that I think it certainly exists with a lot of the people I was writing about in How Children Succeed, and I think is one that in the wake of that book and all the research that went into it, in Angela's work becoming more popular is

one that I think has really caught on with educators, and I think that makes a lot of sense. I think if you're an educator and you hear that there is this other dimension of abilities that matter in kids in terms in getting them to success, what you understand as an educator is skills, right, That's your job as an educator is to improve the skills of your students.

And so if you get this message, which I think is valid, that like, we're only actually paying attention to but half of the skills that kids have and need to succeed, and we're ignoring this other half, you try to turn your attention and using the tools that you have as an educator, to this other set of skills.

But I actually think that that in the process of doing that, we've made some sort of conceptual mistakes, and that those are then replicated as actual practical mistakes in terms of how we try to develop these capacities in the classroom and outside of the classroom. And so instead I'm trying to stop using skills, and the word that I'm using, which is not necessarily more helpful, is capacities. Noncognitive capacities. Problems with that phrase, as problems with all

of these. But I do think like I think language around, yeah, psychological mindsets, habits, attitudes, strengths, Yeah, I mean. But strengths to me, though, is like strengths to me is just sort of like a synonym for skills, you know, It's like a more It's like an euphemism almost for skills. Right, It's a more positive way to describe skills. And you stop calling a character too, yeah, I find, And so I find I find character has some difficulties as well. I mean, one to stay in the in the realm

of language for a bit. I think one thing that I realized as I was working on this is that part of there are a lot of people who get very upset about, you know, my writing. Angel is writing all of the work about grit and character, especially as

it relates to low income kids. And the thing that I think upsets them is that they hear an implication in what I've written, and I think what Angel Is written as well, that we're saying that kids who are growing up in adversity don't have enough of grit enough character, right, And I totally understand that that strong reaction, because if you're using words like character and grit that have even if they have sort of a clear, just sort of descriptive quality, they also have a sort of like moral

valance in terms of how we talk about them, right, Like grit, character, fortitude, those are just good things to have, and people who don't have them we think of them as bad. And so what I care about, you know, the research that I care more about is like the neuroscience that talks about how growing up in really stressful environments affects kids' psychology and affects their neurology, and it affects and that affects their behavior, and that affects how

they do in school. Right, that science, I think is what is most important in terms of understanding what's going

on with low income kids in school. And there's no reason to attach moral language to any of that, Right, Like the kids who are going through existing in stressful situations and having their nervous systems adapt to those stressful situations by firing up their fight or flight responses, and that causes them trouble in school, Like that's a biochemical process, Like that is not a moral process, right, And so using moral language to describe what's happening to those kids

and saying, well, they have trouble persevering because they don't have enough grit. I think that just excludes and turns off a big part of the potential audience for this I think really important message and information and so to me, staying in the realm of you know, scientific language, talking about like what the effect of growing up in adversity does to kids, how that plays out in the classroom.

It has two advantages. One is that I think it gives teachers some real information, some real ideas about what they can do differently in the classroom in order to help those kids succeed. And two, I think that it's more inclusive. It like stops it avoid having a significant part of the potential audience for this message just not want to listen to any of it because they feel

like there's something offensive. And again understandably so about saying poor kids don't have enough character, poor kids don't have enough grit, fair enough, So I mean, just in a nutshell, you're really interested in how environment shapes the development of these traits. I think we can still agree their traits though in a sense what we want them to be we want to develop these traits that they are traits. We want them to be habits for people. That's all.

Traits are our habits of behaviors, patterns of behavior that are an average, you know, are operate in quentitude, so to se try to think of like a way to framing that. But that's what you're interested in, you know. And there's you know, the Applied Psychology Department at NYU. You draw a lot on their research and the development of executive functions, and it was I thought it was interesting as well. In the book, there was one researcher.

I can't remember the name of him right now, but I think it was a male and he was talking about how he doesn't even want to call these things anything. He just wants to like He's like, why do we need to like pinpoint exactly what these things are called at all? Why can't we just like show It's kind of like black holes, right, Like, we don't know what black holes are, but we know by the way of the shape of other stars, the way they move about,

that we've made a change. Right, So as long as things are moving around, you know in a way that we're making a change, you know, that's positive, right, Yeah. I mean, you know, so one of the writers who's most influential on me in this new book is Camille Farrington of the Chicago conserti um on Schools Research and

her report Teaching Adolescenents to Be Learners. That that's a lot of what she talks about there that really like, what we care about is academic behaviors, right, We care about kids showing up to school and being engaged in their work and persevering through difficulty. Right. And so I think the researcher you're talking about is is Carabo Jackson, this economist from Northwestern University. And some of what you're saying is something that I kind of layered onto his research.

I don't know if he would necessarily want to claim all of that, but mostly like what I took from his study. You know, So he's an economist, and so he only has the tools of an economist, and so

he was only able to measure. So he did this big study of like four hundred thousand ninth grade students in North Carolina, who their teachers were, how they responded to having those teachers, what value added that those teachers brought, and he discovered that there were two different types of teachers, the ones who were reliably able to improve their students' test scores and then the ones who are reliably able to improve their students standing in this proxy measure that

he created, which was just attendance, behavior incidents, GPA, and grade on time grade progression. Right, And so if you were in certain teachers classrooms, you were more likely to show up school work hard, thus get a good GPA graduate, you know, finish your year on time, and not get

in trouble. Right. So, to my mind, like as a thought experiment, that's to me is really cool because first it says like, okay, well, we know something is going on in those classrooms, right, we know that those we don't We can't say if it's grit or perseverance or self control or what that those teachers are developing in their students, but we know that their students are behaving in ways that we want them to behave. So that's

the first thing. And then the second thing is that it then as a thought experiment, it then pushes me towards saying like, so, why isn't that enough? Like why isn't that what I want to know? How students are going to respond to whatever climate the teacher is creating in the classroom, and I don't need to know that, you know, I don't need to give those kids tests of different psychological qualities, especially given the fact that the test we have for these arts equalities are not yet

at a stage of being really reliable. Why not instead look at the behaviors and figure out how to help teachers create a climate in the classroom that makes kids behave in the way that we want them to behave. Right, So, one part of what we want is from the behavior and ways want to behave. But another part of what we want, and I think you would agree, is we want them to behave like they want to behave too, we actually care about them and their dreams and their

own unique desires. One criticism of your book could potentially be that it's all about compliance and you want And I don't think you would make that case because you talk a lot about the importance of autonomy, and so let's talk about autonomy for saying, because I think sometimes that can conflict with us wanting people to behave the way we want them to behave, versus if we get autonomy, we start to see their own unique talents, create creativity,

expressions come out in ways that we never could have predicted ahead of time. Sure, yes, how does schools deal with that dual sort of thing? It's a great question. So, I mean, I think I think about it as I have never been a teacher, So sometimes I think about this as a parent more than as a teacher, right, or as a speaker as well. I would say, you're a teacher in a way. Well, that's nice to you to say, but you know, the real teaching I'm too

scared to try. But but you know, so, like, I've got two kids and they're one and six, and so I think with both of them all the time about how about their behavior and what my job is in terms of shaping it, And so I think there's a little both. Like I mean, obviously, I want my think mostly about my older son. I think most I think that I want him to become who he naturally is.

But I also feel like part of my job as a as a parent, and I think part of a teacher's job is that, you know, we understand better than kids do how certain behaviors lead to certain outcomes, right, And so our job is to try to shape those behaviors, to help shape those behaviors. And so partly it's just a practical question, which is that I think that the tool that we usually use with kids in school and outside of school are these behaviorist tools, you know, is

rewards and punishments. And so what really struck me about the research in both Roland Fryer's research about the limitations of incentives in an educational setting and then Edward DC and Richard Ryan's research about the importance of self determination intrinsic motivation in motivating kids to get engaged and work hard in school. What I took from all of that is that actually what works for kids is not the kind of punishments and rewards that we often use in

schools these days. It is the kind of creating the kind of environment that makes them feel intrinsically motivated to do things right. So that's a lot of what I write about. All of that said, I feel like, you know, I do think that it's okay to say, like we want to help kids be intrinsically motivated to work hard, figure out how to achieve their goals, stick with things for a long time. Bounce back from disappointments like those, I'm ready to like embrace as kind of universally positive goals.

But what kids do with that, how they shape that, what they want to be excited about, what they want to learn. That's where I feel like autonomy makes a whole lot of sense. And I think that's what I take from a lot of Angela's work as well, that like she's trying to figure out how to make how to help students become gritty about anything right, how to make them and by gritty, you know, in lots of ways,

she means passionate, excited. And I think what a lot of you know, well off parents have found is that in trying to push kids to be a certain way, to like to be involved in a million different activities and engage in a lot of different activities, that kids often take that on in a compliant kind of way.

But it's only when we give them a little bit of autonomy to choose what they're interested in and choose how are going to be interested in it that they get the kind of deep motivation that's going to turn

into passion and grit. Yeah, I agree with all that, It's just there's this quagmire I think that we're in because if you want to make changes in public policy these days, it seems like you have to show that you made a change in standardized achievement test scores, and so much of the of your book is focused on defining success as academic success as achievement test scores. And

you know, well, I mean, I would question that. I mean because you know, I think a big part of what certainly in how children succeed, A big part of what I was writing about was and what got me interested in noncognitive skills in the first place, is this idea that there are qualities that are not measured in standardized test scores and that are focused in the last fifteen years in education on standardized test scores as the measure of kids success has been limited has helped us back, right,

But that's it. I think that, like, I don't take my skepticism about standardized test scores to mean like that I don't care about kids learning stuff, you know, which is why I feel like, you know, GPA is it's not sort of the perfect measure of kids' success, but it's better, right, And because it measures two things. It measures just cognitive skills, but it also measures like engagement

and motivation and how hard you work. So I don't want to sort of get away from the idea of measurement in school and in sort of thinking about academic success is important, but I think you can do that without relying just on standardized test scores. Well, let's discuss this. This is a really awesome conversation. So is the title of the book, like should it have been helping Children

Succeed in School? Or like, let's just do a thought experiment that you wrote a book called Helping Children Succeed in wife, would it have been any different than what you put in this book? I don't think so. No, I mean I think so. Certainly, there's a significant audience

for this book. I hope is teachers, is educators. I feel like most if we're thinking as a society about how we want to create an infrastructure to help kids who are growing up in poverty to do better, the tool that we have that is most likely to be effective is public schools because that's where that's just that's that's the government institution where kids are spending most of their time. That if we want to try and find a lever to help kids succeed that's the one that's

going to be potentially most immediately effective. So I guess I don't. But I also think that there's a distinction

between success in school and success outside of school. But I think there are a lot of connections between those two things, both in terms of like the very sort of practical fact that succeeding in school has strong correlations with succeeding in life because of how the job market and everything else works, but also that the kind of non cognitive capacities that lead I think to success in school are not in opposition to succeeding outside of school.

Like if you can bounce back from disappointments, if you can become passionate about something and hang on to that passion, if you can persist tasks for a long time, those things are useful. What if you're like a troublemaker or a class clown and you end up starting a startup someday. Let's say you drop out of high school and you create like an amazing startup. So let's see the qualities you have are not so control but actually rebelliousness. You know,

what do you do with those kids? Well? You know, I think that those kids. I think we should have schools that where those kids can succeed. You know, because if you're the kid who's a class clown and is going on to run a startup, you have a lot of other really positive qualities, right, that should be a positive thing in school. And I think good teachers have always figured out how to turn class clowns into successful students. Right.

It's like, yeah, they need a different kind of of input, they need more autonomy, they need more room to perform, right. But like, I just don't buy that those kids will like just that school has nothing to offer them and

they need something else. I think like those you know, I mean like anytime you read biographies of successful entrepreneurs, but also like you know, actors, writers, it's like, I mean, a lot of them have that sort of rebellious quality or rebellious moment, and the ones I think that go on to success are ones that are able to combine that with like actual knowledge about the world, actual you know,

skills outside of that rebelliousness. And I think the best schools should be able to be the instrument that helps give those kids the tools that they need to succeed and not to change them but to help them grow. Sure, you know, I want to be clear. I think that the subset of what noncognitive capacities that you highlight in the book are extremely important to develop. But I want to be clear about that. I am saying there's more

than that than just great carry executive functions. You know, there's the whole imagination brain network that rarely gets discussed. And that's my own little pet thing because I love creativity and imagination and I think, you know, those sets of skills can fall by the wayside as well. So I would just want to make sure we add them to the list when we're having policy discussions and say,

it's not all about persevering in general. You know, sometimes, like some of these people who end up creating an amazing startup someday, might be really gritty about one specific thing and we may be blinded, you know, we may be limiting that potential because we're forcing them to be good at all the school classes. Yeah, you know, oh, absolutely,

just to giving them resources to develop their specific passion. Yeah, And I mean so toward the end of the book, I read about these schools that are becoming known as deeper learning schools, and yeah, One of the reasons I'm so drawn to those schools is that I think that they, as far, you know, in terms of what I've seen, and certainly in a public school universe, they do the best job so far. They're still not doing a good enough job, but no one's doing a good enough job.

But they do the best job of helping kids find those interests and use them in an academic context, right so that your work, your actual like school work, is not filling out you know, worksheets and repeating the same math equations over and over again. It is like building a robot, build you know, making art, directing a play, like having a debate with classmates, like all of that kind of deeper learning activity I think is important on so many levels, and it's something that very few low

income kids are exposed to these days, you know. I mean, I think it helps in all of these you know, DC and Ryan kind of qualities. It makes kids feel more autonomy, more competence, more sense of belonging when they're doing that kind of school work. But I think it also know, it does involve creativity, It does involve thinking outside of the box, it does involve imagination, and I just think we're not using those tools enough, especially in

low income communities for sure. For sure. And then what about well being? I don't think use word happiness once in this book, is true? Yeah, I think that word happens in there. So there's this emerging field called positive education. And I hope you come to the conference this summer by the way, in Texas. Thank you. I'll send you all sorts of invitation. It's the world's first ever positive

education conference. And you know, all of your buds will be there, like Martin Soligavin and Angela dug Or but to all these individuals. So the question there is, you know, how can we maybe even redefine the idea of success to incorporate you know, metrics, moving the dial and well being as well. Yeah, I mean I think I think it's a great question. And I do think that I because I am mostly focused in my writing these days

on kids who are growing up in poverty. I do think that for me anyway, it's hard when you're writing about those kids not to fall into a kind of like, you know, emergency mentality, where like you just have to save them. And I do feel like, you know, things,

especially like cite the statistic that just always sticks with me. That. So, they're fifteen million American kids in poverty, and what seven million of those fifteen million are living in deep poverty, meaning they're at fifty percent of the poverty line or below, which is twelve thousand dollars a year for a family of four. Right, this is half of all poor kids. About ten percent of kids American children zero at eighteen

altogether are in this like really deep poverty. And when you're for those kids, like, it's not just the money, Like, the money is part of it materially, obviously they're really suffering, but that is also tending to go hand in hand with all kinds of social dysfunctions that make their lives really difficult and affect them on a neurobiological level as

well as every other level. So for those kids, like, I absolutely want them to be happy, but I feel like there are so many obstacles in their way to getting that, to getting there, and so I feel like trying to create an education system that helps those kids develop the skills they need to just change their lives, you know, to get to another place, I think is really important. But I do think that, like I do think that I fall prey to that kind of emergency mentality.

When I'm thinking about those kids that I think, like I just want them to like survive and have the skills they need to do better and to have a different you know, have different opportunities, have different possibilities, And so I think it is really important to think at the same time for those kids, right, how do you make them feel a sense of well being? How do you help them feel a sense of well being? How do you help them feel a sense of belonging and

connection and purpose? And when educational interventions can do that, and there are lots of examples out there, some of which I read about, and helping children succeed, I think that is the big win, that's the big victory. Absolutely. So let's make some we can make some direct linkatures here between the perma model of well being that like Marin Selgman came up with and your two biggies that you come up when you're let's map them onto each other.

So I can actually make a direct link to the happiness literature, because we'll see after all that I don't think what you're talking about is all together very different from what well being researchers are calling well being. You know, okay, so it's okay, let's map that. So PERMA involves the P is positive emotions, E is engagement are as, positive relationships ms meaning slash purpose, and A is a sense

of achievement or you know, mastering. So in a lot of ways, we could probably take the PERMA model and condense it to I don't know where the positive emotions is, you know, I don't know's you don't talk too much about that, But your two biggies are a sense of connection and relatedness and a sense of growth and potential or giving people work that is challenging, rigorous and meaningful.

So you have the engagement part maps on to the growth of potential section, then the meaning and the M and the A which is achievement, maps on to that, and then you have the social relationships that maps onto the relatedness. And maybe we can say once we satisfy your two biggies, positive emotions will come as a result. Is that Yeah, I mean, I think that's my hope.

But I think but I think you're pointing out an important thing, which is that I'm kind of using that as a I'm kind of identifying that as like an end an end goal rather than an important tool, you know, And I think that is sort of what's part of what's inherent in perma. That like when kids, when anybody feels like good, when you feel a sense of well being, yeah, and you feel happy, it's going to be easier to do all these other things. It's easier to work, it's

easier to learn, it's easier to read. It makes you want to have more grit, you know, when people are dying all around. I mean, when you're in such a horrible poverty, stricten environment where like your life is in danger, right, it's very hard to be forced to have grit. Yeah, yeah, it's really hard. And I feel like I don't know if this is responsive to your question, but you know,

it just strikes me. I feel like one element of poverty in kids' lives that we don't really talk about enough is just that like poverty just I mean, growing

up in real adversity can just make kids sad. You know, there's there's a lot of kids who are like I feel like, we don't think about that sort of straightforward like emotional psychological effect that growing up in adversity can have on kids, which is it that a lot of them do feel like depressed, you know that, Like and I find this all the time talking to kidsool who

are growing up in real diversity. Absolutely there are some who are you know, who are happy, who are succeeding, who are are overcoming those difficulties, But for a lot of them being in a situation where like you're constantly feeling like you're not misering up in school, you're in a very stressful situation at home, you are you know, perhaps in a neighborhood that itself is stressful, like just on a day to day basis, that just wears you down,

you know, And so giving kids ways of overcoming that, tools and just opportunities to feel good, to feel connection, to feel positive, I think is not only a good end goal, but also a good instrumental goal rights both, Like we can call that as such a deep a deep philosophical question. How do we know as educators that we have succeeded, that we've succeeded, you know, not the students have succeeded, that we've succeeded in our goal? You know? Is it when we have raised all over standardized test

scores to one hundred percent how are we done? We're like, Oh, we've succeeded is when we've created students that are happy, healthy, when we not I don't mean say created students now what I mean to say it only yeah, you know, we've got it, We've obtained that goal. You know, I think it's just a I don't have the answer by any means. But how the heck do we know that? What? You know? And I guess different schools that you visited have different goals, right, Yeah, I think that they do

have different approaches. And I think, you know, you're making me think a lot about this question of just sort of like mental well being, because I do think that there's like there are some teachers in any kind of school, but especially in high poverty schools, who like, there's a risk on the other side too, that like you have those teachers who are just great at, like me, at being fun, you know, and making students feel like happy and yeah, that's the class it's always fun to go to,

but they're actually not like teaching anything, you know what I mean? And and like, so a little of that is a really positive thing, but like when you're not actually expanding your student's opportunity in the long haul, with just making them feel good in the in the moment, and I clarify that they're not necessarily explicitly learning the lesson plan we've given that we want to be learned, but we don't know that they're not learning a key foundation.

I mean, it's important in life to learn how to deal with adversity through here, to deal with adversity through play. In fact, I use the word play in this book, and I like that, and I was like, expand that, expand that. It's like you killed me. You use the word once and then in the next sentence, I think you redefined it as something else, you as executive functions. And I'm like, no, no, it is what it is. It's something Yeah. I wish I could find the page

right now. Yeah, well know, I mean I certainly talked about play in early childhood. Is like that, that's that's the thing that kids learn from. That's what you know. I talk about this Jamaica experiment in Jamaica where like that's what changed things for kids was their parents, you know, being coached to play with them more. I think all that stuff is important. I just you know, so I'm

ninety five percent going with you on this. I just think that there is a risk though, of that if you focus too much on kids happiness and say like that's what's important. Is giving them only a sense of well being that like for me, it's got that's got to be twinned with increasing their opportunities. One of Marty's grad students has gone over to like Baton Nations and has has given training on like ten millegs to increase

well being. And they found that by training and starting there as a starting point, they found like zero point six standard deviation, increasing standardized test scorers. They found that all these outcomes, these kind of things that you talk about in this book came happened to come as a

result of teaching. Like mindfulness was one of the exercise creativity, just like understanding like gratitude, like positive psychology exercises, you know, like gratitude and optimism, and you talk, you do talk about optimism and thinks, but kind of you know, explicitly training the teachers on these things increased standardized test scorers, increased the kind of outcomes like school attendants and things

that we need to show public policy makers change. Yeah, I think it is kind of a false dichotomy sometimes between either this or that. I think you're totally right, and I mean, to me, like a lot of you know, when I talk about like what a teacher needs to do is just sort of change the climate in the classroom, the environment in the classroom, Like I think that's a

lot of what it comes down to. You know that there are a lot of classrooms, especially that where low income kids are studying, that are contentious, you know, that are where there's a lot of conflict, excuse me, where there is not a lot of creativity, not a lot of opportunity for imagination, where there's a lot of you know, like repetitive work, a lot of basic instruction, and all

of that I think is part of classroom climate. You know, I just think it's like, to me, the message it's important to give to teachers is that like classroom environment that's most beneficial for kids certainly involves happiness and fun.

It just isn't it is It's not just limited to that that like that that the most successful classrooms pair happiness and fun and belonging with challenge and work, and and that's part of the permo you know, the a you know, yeah, absolutely, And I want to give creditor Marty scrad student. His name is Alejandro Adler. Great, he's doing really great work on that topic. Thanks for letting me ask you these questions. By ways, it's such an important conversation and it's it's fun to talk about these

things for me too. Yeah, really really interesting. So when to end here? You know, on some very practical things. I mean, you argue that the most powerful anti poverty strategies are changing policies, changing practices, and changing our way of thinking about these things. Are you optimistic that we are in progress on these three fronts? I am optimistic that we know more than we used to in terms

of making progress. You know, I in my book and in real life, I go back and forth between feeling optimistic and feeling pessimistic about the opportunities for kids who are growing up in poverty. You know, on the whole, we're not doing a good job. You know, we're not doing a good job, and we're not and things are not improving. We don't have a system to support kids who are growing up in poverty, especially deep poverty, and arguably the situation is worse for kids in poverty now

than it was a couple of decades ago. So it's hard to feel super optimistic when that is the situation in the country as a whole. But one part of what I say and the conclusion to the book is that I think when faced with certain of these interventions that I think are using really really different, deep innovative ideas to approach kids in a much more realistic kind of way, to look at them not just as problems,

but as kids with lots of possibility. To look at them not just as sort of vessels for you know, giving them information having that come out in test scores, but as kids who are going to need to learn, who need to learn in a much broader, more engaged kind of way. Individual kids' lives can change in profound ways. There's a lot that teachers can do, There's a lot that parents can do. There's a lot that policymakers can do. So I feel like I feel both. I feel both

optimistic and pessimistic. I feel pessimistic. I feel bummed out about where we are as a nation in terms of what we're doing for our kids who are growing up in poverty. I feel hopeful when I see what some of the new approaches to helping those kids do better are awesome, and thank you for raising awareness through your book and your writings of these important topics. I think that they can only help with our changing these public policy sort of things. So thank you, Paul, thank you

very much, Thanks for the conversation. Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought per booking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com