Why rats lick their babies and how to lick yours (IV)

How do we know the children who are likely to go to the university, get a job, get married and have a family?And how do we help those who are at the risk of these outcomes? Some experts and educators searched for the definitive answer to the questions above and the overarching problem of character […]

How do we know the children who are likely to go to the university, get a job, get married and have a family?And how do we help those who are at the risk of these outcomes?
Some experts and educators searched for the definitive answer to the questions above and the overarching problem of character and personality traits needed to be tracked by schools or qualities to teach their students or to be used to predict individuals’ future performance. In order words, the experts tried to unpack character qualitiesthat are indicators of success.
Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigancame up with the solution.  In their book,“CharacterStrengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification,” they listed 24 character strengths.  However, other experts felt this 800-page book was too unwieldy.
Therefore, Angela Duckworth, Seligman’s protégé, teamed up with Seligman’s co-author, Christopher Peterson, and they came up with the Grit Scale.  Grit is here defined as “persistence at task.”
To measure an individual’s grit, the person has to fill out a simple three-minute questionnaire with 12 items on it.  Respondents answered questions such as “New ideas andprojects sometimes distract me from previous ones”; “Setbacks don’t discourage me”; “I am a hardworker”; and “I finish whatever I begin.” For each question, the respondent chooses from 5, “very muchlike me,” to 1, “not like me at all.”
Grit has been found to predict GPA, success in Spelling Bee, which soldiers will finish their cadet training and who will dropout and so forth.
While the Grit Scale is able to predict a good deal of life outcomes, its major drawback is that it is not broad enough.  Therefore, Angela Duckworthteamed up with two school administrators David Levin and Dominic Randolphand settled on the following seven character strengths: grit, self-control, zest, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity.
This new set of strengths does not suffer from Seligman’s collection of 24, yet added six more to Duckworth’s Grit Scale.
Volitional Implementation
But it is not enough to have the strengths or the motivation for the implementation. “Duckworth finds it useful to divide the mechanics of achievement into two separate dimensions: motivation and volition,” Paul Tough reports.“Each one, she says, is necessary to achieve long-term goals, but neither issufficient alone. Most of us are familiar with the experience of possessing motivation but lacking volition:You can be extremely motivated to lose weight, for example, but unless you have the volition-thewillpower, the self-control-to put down the cherry Danish and pick up the free weights, you’re not goingto succeed.”
One of the many results, ensuing from these studies that you can use immediately, is what is called Metacognitive Strategies and Implementation Intentions (MCII). Metacognition is a fancy term which means thinking about thinking. 
However, let’s see the different types of ways people make decisions.  First, there are those called the optimists, who, when making a decision, focus on the positive outcomes of achieving that goal.  For example, if a student wants to raise his grade to an A, an optimist would focus on the peer and parental recognition that comes with a high grade.  The optimist, surprisingly, is not a successful goal setter.
The second type of goal setters, called the dwellers, focus on the obstacles that would prevent them from achieving their goals.  This set of goal setters, also, unsurprisingly, don’t do well; that is, they don’t achieve their goals.
The third type uses what is called mental contrasting.  That is, they combine both the strategies of both the dwellers and the optimists.  For example, when a student wants to improve his grade to an A, he would think of all the obstacles that stand in his way, such as watching the TV.  But he would think of how to solve that problem, then prepare a plan to resolve the difficulty.  For example, he would say that first, he would do his homework or put off going to the playground until after doing his homework.  This metacognitive strategy, you can immediately teach your children or your students.
Conclusion
From MichaelMeaney’s rats to Sroufe’s Strange Situation to Seligman’s and Duckworth’s studies on character strengths, up to Paul Tough’s book summarizing the entire efforts, the scientific study of character has come a long way.  And so far, we’ve learnt a few lessons along the way.  We know that early parental care relationship predicts an individual’s academic journey including graduation from secondary school – often better than IQ.  This predictive power of early nurturance holds right from an early age; this means that you can look at a four-year old child and predict, with 77 percent accuracy, whether he is going to complete secondary school or not. 
We also know that secure attachment relationship produces children who are confident, curious and better able to deal with setbacks.  On the other hand, children with the history of anxious attachment don’t do as well, because they lack the necessary character strengths. 
However, the studies also uncovered two important insights.  One, attachment classification is not set in stone and attachment relationship may change during childhood.  Two, some children with anxious attachment went on to thrive.
We also know that grit alone, as a character strength, can predict a good deal of life outcomes- from success at work to men who are going to remain in their marriages.
For more information on the impressive value of grit, read Angela Duckworth’s new book, Grit.  The book will be released in May 2016, but it is already a bestseller on Amazon.com through pre-orders.
Concluded.