How Children Succeed By Paul Tough: Article Analysis

Throughout the years I have always found myself being attached to my parents. I think this kind of attachment began when I was lost in a mall for three hours and couldn’t find my parents. This incident triggered an instant fear when I was young and didn’t know where my parents were. I always thought I would have to go through the same stress I went through when I lost them if I did get lost again. The journalist Paul Tough talks about an opposite problem that made me remembered my own issue in his book How Children succeed. He talks about how parents being attached to their children would affect their future. Even though, I have always found myself being attached to my parents, I still consider myself as a fully independent person. So I was …show more content…
He says that the impact of the parents being attentive may affect children’s future behavior and way of thinking. He bases this premiere on an experiment done by psychologists about humans, but done in rats. This experiment was about how rats being groomed and licked by their mother will affect their future. Psychologists believe it’s the most parallel to grooming and licking; the experiment done in rats. The effects of the experiment were the opposite of what they thought they would find. They found that parents who respond to their children immediately and whom are very attentive, result in children being more independent in year one. On the other hand, parents who ignored their children’s attention resulted in children being more insecure and dependent. This kind of interaction Paul Tough associates with …show more content…
He says that Meany’s team was studying the brain tissue of humans who had committed suicides; not only humans who were abused in childhood but humans who weren’t abused as well. The study conducted that suicides who had been abused and assaulted in their childhood had experienced methylation effects in the same part of their DNA. Even though, the abuse had opposite effects than the grooming and licking mentioned before did. The effects were switching off the healthy stress response function that grooming and licking switched on rats. Readers might argue why would Tough set this study as an example of his claim? I think tough made this example because he wanted his readers to relate this example to the rat experiment example. Causing his readers to understand the main idea he wants to portray. Even though Tough gives great examples, some readers might argue his intended use of the rat experiment and him relating it to Humans DNA. Some readers might think that they way Tough used the rat experiment to show what he meant would be hard for them to relate it to humans. Readers might think that the emotions that were felt by rats wouldn’t affect the Humans body in the same way, since Humans have different genitalia. Humans often like to relate to things that are familiar to them, but having to relate to an animals emotion and action might mislead some Humans to believe the idea