The Formula: Unlocking the Secrets to Raising Highly Successful Children
323
The Formula: Unlocking the Secrets to Raising Highly Successful Children
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Overview
Could the secret be how they were parented?
This book unveils how parenting helped shape some of the most fascinating people you will ever encounter, by doing things that almost any parent can do. You don't have to be wealthy or influential to ensure your child reaches their greatest potential. What you do need is commitment—and the strategies outlined in this book.
In The Formula: Unlocking the Secrets to Raising Highly Successful Children, Harvard economist Ronald Ferguson, named in a New York Times profile as the foremost expert on the US educational "achievement gap," along with award-winning journalist Tatsha Robertson, reveal an intriguing blueprint for helping children from all types of backgrounds become successful adults.
Informed by hundreds of interviews, the book includes never-before-published <wbr />insights from the "How I was Parented Project" at Harvard University, which draws on the varying life experiences of 120 Harvard students. Ferguson and Robertson have isolated a pattern with eight roles of the "Master Parent" that make up the Formula: the Early Learning Partner, the Flight Engineer, the Fixer, the Revealer, the Philosopher, the Model, the Negotiator, and the GPS Navigational Voice.
The Formula combines the latest scientific research on child development, learning, and brain growth and illustrates with life stories of extraordinary individuals—from the Harvard-educated Ghanian entrepreneur who, as the young child of a rural doctor, was welcomed in his father's secretive late-night political meetings; to the nation's youngest state-wide elected official, whose hardworking father taught him math and science during grueling days on the family farm in Kentucky; to the DREAMer immigration lawyer whose low-wage mother pawned her wedding ring to buy her academically outstanding child a special flute.
The Formula reveals strategies on how you—regardless of race, class, or background—can help your children become the best they can be and shows ways to maximize their chances for happy and purposeful lives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781946885616 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BenBella Books, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/05/2019 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 323 |
| Sales rank: | 1,001,715 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Tatsha Robertson, MA, is an award-winning editor and writer with more than 20 years of experience handling investigative, feature, and news stories for leading magazines and newspapers. As the first female New York City Bureau Chief and National Rover for the Boston Globe, she began studying how parents raise successful children some ten years ago. She pioneered Essence magazine's focus on investigative and news articles, which led to the positioning of the magazine as a significant authority and voice on news and led to an interview with President Obama on parenting. Most recently, she was a senior editor at People, where she focused on crime stories. She has been an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University since 2005. Ms. Robertson has been a frequent guest on national media, appearing on programs like TODAY and for television networks that include CNN, HLN, FOX, and MSNBC. A prolific writer, Robertson recently co-authored Media Circus with Kim Goldman. She is also completing a thriller. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and earned a bachelor's degree at Morris College and a master's degree in journalism at The Ohio State University.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Mystery of Success
THE BLACK BOX
We all know someone who was talented as a child but who nonetheless ended up leading an ordinary life. So when we encounter people who have experienced extraordinary success, people like Ryan, Sangu, and Maggie, while we admire their triumphs, we can't help but wonder: How did they do it? Was it just natural talent?
What transformed their natural-born abilities into extraordinary adult success? And could we, too, have been as successful, if only we, or our parents, had done something differently?
Plenty of books attempt to answer these questions, but few, if any, go beyond observing the children themselves. Most fail to investigate the connections between a child's achievement and their parents' own backstories and motivations. And seldom do they address the full span of the child's journey from birth through early adulthood.
Meanwhile, social science research is preoccupied with the things that go wrong in childhood and how parents can prevent or fix problems — not what they can do to create a high achiever. It's unusual to investigate the influence of the parents' approach on an achiever's remarkable success, and even rarer to try to understand the details of why that approach helped the child excel.
From long-established work on the differences and similarities between twins separated at birth, to more recent studies that show how early differences in children's language-processing abilities arise in the first few years of life, science has provided us with a plethora of studies that establish just how profoundly parenting matters. Yet when we read about outstanding adults, we have no way of knowing how they got to be so spectacular. How did the parents of successful people contribute to their lauded achievements, and how can we glean actionable insights about their childrearing?
This information is metaphorically hidden from view — as though inside a proverbial black box. In science, computing, and engineering, a "black box" is an object or system in which things go in one side (the input) and come out changed from the other (the output), but you have no idea what happens in between. We know certain childhoods result in outstanding adults, but we don't know why, because we were not there to see inside the "box," or the home, where the parenting happened. All we see is the output: the outstanding adult.
In medicine, a black box experiment is one that includes both a control group, which doesn't receive treatment, and another group, which receives the treatment being tested. Such experiments are considered the gold standard for determining if the treatment works, but they have a common shortcoming: we don't find out how or why the treatment works, which makes it hard to improve it based on what's been learned. Many treatments have been proven to cure illnesses, but often the scientists who produce the proof still don't understand what the medicine does inside a patient's body to result in a cure.
Similarly, when it comes to successful parenting, we don't know the details of what the parents did that guided their children to become so outstanding. Think of the lessons to be learned if we could take a close look into the homes where the world's most successful people grew up. What would we find out about success? What could parents learn about how to help their own children reach their full potential?
We now know that brain development for life success begins years before a child sets foot in a preschool. The science is clear that, starting at birth or even before, parental decisions can have a profound influence on how successful a child becomes, all the way into adulthood. And it's not just the things we do that are extremely important to a child's future; the things we don't do at home can cause kids' potential to go unharvested.
This book opens up the black box to find out what the parents of high achievers do. Over the course of fifteen years, we interviewed 200 high-achieving adults and some of their parents. In those interviews, a clear pattern emerged: the approaches that parents of high achievers adopted, beginning in the earliest years of life, bore real and striking similarities, despite those parents' widely divergent backgrounds and life circumstances.
We've given this pattern a name: "the Formula."
AN INVESTIGATION INTO SUCCESS
The research that would eventually yield the Formula began in two very different places.
For Tatsha Robertson, it started in 2003 in a newsroom at the Boston Globe, where she was a national correspondent whose job was to travel across the country. She'd begun to notice that the very smart and special people she came across during her reporting had parents with similar traits. She called Ron Ferguson at Harvard University, with whom she had spoken numerous times when she needed an expert perspective for a story.
"Could strategic parenting be taught?" she asked. He said it could and described an emerging movement among researchers who were starting to discuss how to do just that.
Ultimately Tatsha began to wonder if these parents of extraordinary people were following a discernible set of parental guidelines, a formula. Over the next ten years she interviewed sixty people about how they were raised, looking for similarities in their stories. Sometimes they were colleagues; other times they were new people she met while traveling for work. Although she mostly did the interviews on her own, sometimes she investigated the parenting of the people she interviewed for the Globe and other publications, including President Barack Obama.
For Ron, the search began during an advising session in his office at Harvard University in 2009. Kyoung Lee, a master's degree student, was selecting fall-term courses at the Kennedy School of Government, where Ron has taught and conducted research for over thirty years. The two found themselves talking about South Korean culture, academic standards, and parenting. Ron told Kyoung about South Korean students of his who had insisted it was unacceptable in Korea to score lower than the top 5 percent of students nationally in their age group. That struck Ron as unreasonable: Even if an achiever performs at the 90th percentile of their peers, they fail? Because of the way Ron had been raised, this simply did not compute — but it did for Kyoung, whose parents were born and raised in Korea. She observed, "If I got 99 percent on a test, my mom wanted to know where the other point was, even if nobody else got more than a 90."
Kyoung and Ron wondered together whether other Harvard students had been pressed to find that missing point. How prevalent, they wanted to know, were racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and national differences in how her peers across the university were parented? After all, her classmates' parents had all raised children who, like Kyoung, had risen to the top of the extremely selective Harvard admissions process. Had their children been parented in similar ways?
Their conversations led to the How I Was Parented Project at Harvard: 120 interviews with Harvard undergraduates and graduate students, from which at least half the people in this book are drawn, including Sangu Delle. To launch that project in 2009, Ron and his student volunteers sent emails to hundreds of students at the university, inviting them to be interviewed around the question, "What roles did your parents play in your success?"
Over the next two years, student volunteers actively sought out these stories, drawing on Harvard students from virtually all walks of life and backgrounds — black and white, Asian and Latino American; Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and atheists. Some of the students came from very wealthy families, but many did not. For every student raised by doctors or lawyers, engineers or professors, another was raised by a cashier, a bus driver, or a cook. Some were born in Korea, China, or India, while others came from villages in Africa, cities in Mexico, or towns in the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Bulgaria. But most were Americans, hailing from points as varied as the cornfields of Oklahoma and the inner city of Detroit.
As the volunteers conducted one long interview after another, they asked the same scripted questions designed to delve into the subjects' recollections of childhood and the roles their parents played.
The recordings grew into a massive narrative catalogue of students' earliest memories and their journeys to high academic achievement. At the heart of these memories were their parents — their first and most lasting teachers and guides.
Ron and his research assistants began coding the data and looking for patterns, but it quickly became clear that the complexity involved would require someone who could single-mindedly focus on the interviews for an extended period of time, so the project was put on the back burner. When Tatsha called Ron again in 2014 to tell him about a book she wanted to write, on whether there was a parenting formula that successful parents were following, Ron said he believed so, but did not yet know what it was — and asked if they should write the book together, drawing in part from the How I Was Parented Project data. Rather than design social science tests of hypotheses about the nature of effective parenting, we set out to perform an investigation, more journalistic in nature, that would delve deep into the lives of achievers — and then, as our investigation began to suggest that strong commitment to purposeful parenting was grounded in a parent's personal narrative, into the lives of their parents, as well.
Tatsha spent months listening to and analyzing anonymous audio. She and Ron then compared the parenting of the Harvard achievers to that of the non-Harvard achievers Tatsha had interviewed over the years. A formula began to emerge.
Knowing that, in past research, people of different socioeconomic backgrounds exhibited different parenting styles, we had expected to see a culture-specific tapestry revealing a diverse range of parenting theories, values, and strategies that differed systematically by family background. But that's not what happened. There was, for example, no identifiably superior "Asian" or "American" way to do it. Rather, across race, socioeconomic status, education level, religion, and nationality, there were surprisingly strong, common parenting threads that helped produce future successes.
The initial recorded interviews by students were a good start but merely scratched the surface of the parenting patterns we saw emerging. Together, we re-interviewed achievers drawn from the Harvard project, who had since graduated, as well as non-Harvard achievers who we met through other means. (At the time of the interviews, all the achievers were in their twenties, thirties, or forties, apart from a set of twins who had just turned fifty.) And like so many rivers and streams that flow to the sea, the accounts they shared led us to return to the source and interview the parents themselves.
MASTERS OF THE FORMULA
We call the parents we meet and hear about in this book "master parents" — not because they started out knowing all the answers, but because they were masterful at figuring out how to unlock their child's full potential.
In most cases, the parents had not studied at the greatest schools. A few hadn't even finished high school. But what was unique, if not genius, about them was their ability to do whatever was needed to raise thoughtful, very smart, ambitious, and purposeful children.
Both the most and least educated among these parents had taught their child simple numerical concepts and how to read basic words well before the age of five, and they had talked to the child as an equal, respecting their intellect and answering their questions after careful thought. Regardless of material resources, these parents exhibited intense commitment and vision. Parents at every socioeconomic level were relentless in finding the time and resources needed to help launch and sustain their child as a high academic performer. They were motivated by their own backstories, which gave them insight into the types of qualities they hoped their child would grow up to have. But, crucially, they never tried to mold their child based on their own dreams — on what the parents themselves had once wished to be but failed to become.
This is the core of the Formula: strategic choices that help a child reach their greatest potential and well-being. Built on eight parenting principles, or "roles" the parents play in the child's life, the Formula inspires the development of both academic and nonacademic skills in a way that sets the child up for future success.
But there are no superhumans here. The Formula can be learned and cultivated. And while every child may not become a virtuoso musician, a Harvard graduate, or a wealthy and famous businesswoman, parents equipped with the Formula can still enhance their child's academic and life success no matter what the child's base level of potential might be.
Before we get to the Formula itself, however, let's take a closer look at the kind of people the Formula produces.
CHAPTER 2What We Mean by Success
EUDAIMONIC FLOURISHING
Skeptical, but interested in the possibility that there's a parenting formula that can produce successful, academically and socially outstanding young people, listeners lean in close. Eyes half-squinted, heads cocked slightly to one side, they often pose several questions: What exactly is so special about these people — these products of the Formula? Why are they, and the parenting that cultivated them, worth emulating? How do you define "success"?
Success, simply put, is the attainment of a goal. But what goal or goals are the Formula-raised children achieving? What kind of success are we talking about?
There are two dominant but contrasting philosophies on the topic of success. One, often labeled hedonism, is the idea made famous by the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who believed the purpose of life is to experience the greatest possible pleasure while avoiding pain. Imagine opulent parties, with the finest foods and flowing champagne inside a ridiculously large mansion. In this definition, the goal of success is satisfying one's material and carnal desires.
The other idea derives from the Greek word eudaimonia, translated as human flourishing, and was a central concept in Aristotle's philosophy. The goal in this kind of success is self-realization. It's the high you feel and the growth you achieve as you pursue a challenging goal — the idea that you can experience your best self by striving toward mastery. Picture American gymnast Simone Biles, flipping and twirling in space, practicing for years in order to compete in the Olympics, or a young Albert Einstein in 1905, his "miracle year," sitting at his desk fine-tuning the fourth in a series of papers that would revolutionize science.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Formula"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Ronald F. Ferguson and Tatsha Robertson.
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ContentsIntroduction
Chapter 1. The Mystery of SuccessThe Black BoxAn Investigation into SuccessMasters of the FormulaChapter 2. What We Mean by SuccessPurpose + Agency + Smarts = Fully RealizedProdigies versus the Products of the FormulaWho Our Achievers Are and How We Chose Them
Chapter 3. The FormulaThe Incredible Life of Jarell LeeThe Formula: The Eight Roles of Master ParentingParenting Styles: What Is Different About the Formula?
Chapter 4. The StrategistsThe Strange and Strategic Parenting of Lisa SonWhy Esther Wojcicki Raised the Smartest Girls in the WorldMs. Badger’s Holographic Ideal
Chapter 5. The Early-Learning Partner (Role #1)Rob Humble’s Moment of TruthThe Science of PlayTeaching a Baby to Read: The Early-Lead EffectThe Girl Raised by a Village of Teenagers
Chapter 6. The Flight Engineer (Role #2)Masters Monitor and Manage (Even from the White House)Asserting Authority: “You Will Respect My Child”Knowing When (Not) to Step In: “You Can Deal with Your Teacher This Time”
Chapter 7. SiblingsCautionary TalesThe Receptive ChildIs Your Oldest Child Really Smarter, or Were You Just Tired with the Rest of Them?
Chapter 8. The Fixer (Role #3)The Fixer to the Rescue
Vigilance: How One Mother Deconstructed the SATSacrifice: Dad Says, “We Need to Leave—Now!”Resourcefulness: The Girl Who Needed a Flute
Chapter 9. The Revealer (Role #4)Albert Einstein’s Master ParentsThe Art of Supplementing EducationExposure to the World—and Harsh Realities
Chapter 10. The Philosopher (Role #5)The Preschooler Who Debated Aristotle in the BathtubWhat the Philosopher Creates, Part 1: Bree Newsome’s MissionWhat the Philosopher Creates, Part 2: Jarell Lee’s Purpose
Chapter 11. The Model (Role #6)A Ripple EffectWhen the Past Provides the ModelTracing Family Mindset
Chapter 12. The Negotiator (Role #7)Bringing a Child to the Bargaining TableNegotiators, not PushoversMaster Parent versus Tiger ParentIs the Formula the Superior American Style of Parenting?
Chapter 13. Mastering HurdlesSuccess MindsetHow “Gritty” Ryan Quarles Found a Way to WinMaggie Masters a Memory SlipThe Future News Anchor Who Stuttered
Chapter 14. The GPS (Role #8)The Navigational Voice in Their HeadThe GPS and the Fully Realized Human BeingThe Achievers as Parents
Conclusion: The Formula’s SecretAcknowledgmentsNotesIndexAbout the Authors
What People are Saying About This
"If you are a parent or plan to be, read this book. You'll learn what you can do—and there is a lot you can do—to help your child succeed in the fullest sense of the word. Beautifully written, impeccably crafted. I loved it."—Angela Duckworth
"The Formula is for all parents who want to be powerful advocates and strategic partners for their kids. Refreshingly practical, it unpacks what parents of high-achieving adults did to help their children be successful and happy. I recognize so many of these traits in my wonderful parents."
—Dr. Bridget Terry Long, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education
“With over 40 years of education experience, I have learned that a child’s success isn’t solely dependent on grades or standardized tests. Success, starts first and foremost at home, with parents that support an intrinsic motivation for their children to reach their fullest potential. However, just as children have different learning styles, parents, as well, have different parenting styles. The Formula masterfully combines the latest research with compelling, real-life stories and introduces us to different parenting styles and provides a formula for teaching, motivating, and empowering successful children.”
—John D. Couch, Apple’s first VP of Education and coauthor of Rewiring Education
The Formula pursues an important question that social scientists, preoccupied with explaining the problematic outcomes of childhood, seldom address: the role parents play in developing children—regardless of their race, class, or national origin—who become extraordinarily successful in life. Ferguson and Robertson’s compelling analysis of data collected on the life stories of interesting people who change the world is a must-read."
—William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University