Is My Two-Year-Old ...?

"Is my two-year-old ...?" 

  

How would you finish that sentence? According to a speaker I heard recently, the number one word to come next on a Google search is "gifted." Apparently, for parents of a two-year-old the question the question that most often comes to mind is not whether or not he is developing in an age-appropriate and timely manner. Rather, many are wondering whether their toddler has extraordinary cognitive abilities. 

I wonder why it's so important for us to know if our child is gifted. I wonder why this concern trumps all other concerns--at least on Google. Why are we preoccupied with cognitive ability over kindness, conscience or courage? We put stickers on our cars declaring our child's status as an honor student, but give little recognition to character qualities that have a much greater impact on her ultimate success in life. Perhaps we believe giftedness is the golden ticket to success. It’s not!

In How Children Succeed, author and education writer Paul Tough, How Children Succeed, reflects on his own journey to find a good school for his son. Early on he notes, “The conventional wisdom about child development over the past few decades has been misguided. We have been focusing on the wrong skills and abilities in our children, and we have been using the wrong strategies to help nurture and teach those skills.” He goes on to suggest what we are learning now has the “potential to change how we raise our children, how we run our schools, and how we construct our social safety net.” This got my attention. As a parent, educator, psychologist and grandparent, I wondered what we might learn to guide us to help the children of today become the adults of tomorrow.

According to Tough, there are three basic things researchers have identified as critical to our children’s success. They are “grit, curiosity and the hidden power of character.” It’s important to note Tough makes an important distinction between what many of us know as “character education” and what he describes in How Children Succeed. He cites a national evaluation of character-education programs by the National Center for Education Research (2010 that evaluated seven popular elementary-school programs over three consecutive years. No impact of significance was observed at all from the programs – “not on student behavior, not on academic achievement, not on school culture” (p. 60).

Just what does Tough mean, then, when he speaks about character? Try perseverance (grit), self-control, zest, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity. Without these qualities, even children with a high IQ flounder. With them, children of average intelligence often far exceed the expectations of parents and teachers. We tend to think of qualities such as these as inherited and stable, but Tough (who interviewed many award-winning researchers and educators), claims they can be learned. Parents, teachers and caregivers can help children develop grit, self-control, social intelligence and gratitude. They can interact with a child in ways that help expand his zest for learning, optimism and curiosity.

Developmentally, I don’t know any two-year-olds who have mastered any of these qualities, but I have observed some who are further along than others. They’re generally in the company of parents who are more concerned about their character than their cognitive abilities. I wonder what kind of Google search we could find for that.