How Kids Learn Resilience Essay

The Importance of Character in the Classroom With today’s evolving society, toxic stress is becoming an enormous issue in young children. “How Kids Learn Resilience,” which was written by Paul Tough, was published in the June 2016 issue of The Atlantic. The article goes into depth about a problem that many “at-risk” schools face: lower-income children struggle in the classroom more than those in a financially stable home. The effect stems from the lack of noncognitive abilities in the low-income students. Often, children in this group experience a lot more stress and trauma than those that are not. This toxic stress can lead to a lack of rational actions and thinking. The only way teachers know how to react to these actions is by packing on more discipline, which can make a child more frustrated.
I agree with the author when he writes, “the most important environmental factor in children’s early lives… is the way their parents and other adults interact with them” (Tough, 3). For very early life, children are only around their parents, and therefore learn everything they know from them. This can have either a positive or negative effect on a child and can shape them for the rest of their lives. With such a huge influence, I believe parents’ actions decide how a child will behave at least in their first few years in school. Paul Tough uses many outside sources to support his article. One of these sources describes one man that used incentives, such as money and cell phones, to get students to study more. Long-term results showed that many students did not improve test scores through the incentive program. I knew the motives would not work. The gifts given to the students made them memorize things quickly in order to score well on a short-term basis. In the end, when it was time for them to test cumulatively, they had not been studying in the right way and would