Grit, Resilience, and Motivation in Early Childhood

Lisa B. Fiore, Ph.D., is a professor of Early Childhood Education and Director of the Child Homelessness Initiative at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• 1. What’s Going On Here? 2. Constructing an Understanding of Grit 3. Constructing an Understanding of Resilience 4. Constructing an Understanding of Motivation 5. Risk Factors: Poverty and the Environment 6. Risk Factors: Race, Gender, and Disability 7. Awareness of Self 8. Responsibility for Others 9.Advocacy and Action

"Lisa Fiore’s confidence in young children is a powerful antidote to an increasingly toxic educational milieu where young children’s ways of being are too often dismissed as "soft" and non-cognitive. At turns soulful and scientific, this profound-yet-practical call to action invites caregivers, above all, to be in relationship with the growing child. With clarity and compassion, honed from her decades as a psychologist, educator, and observer of human development, Fiore shows us how."—Erika Christakis, author of The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need From Grownups