Scientific research sheds new light on the mental phenomenon of pulling out. In his book, The Bond of Power, Joseph Chilton Pearce tells of the research of psychologist Burton White of Harvard’s Child Development Center. After finding that about one child in thirty is brilliant and happy, White did a great deal of research to determine what demographic or psychological characteristics distinguished those children. But the children came from a wide variety of backgrounds - rich and poor, small families and large, broken and stable homes, poorly and well-educated parents - and from all parts of the U.S. Finally, through extensive questioning, he determined that the brights and happy children had only one thing in common: All of them spent noticeable amounts of time staring peacefully and wordlessly into space.

The second was a group of 456 inner-city Boston boys like Henry Keane, selected for a different reason: they were children who grew up in some of Boston’s most troubled families and most disadvantaged neighborhoods, but who, at age 14, had mostly succeeded in avoiding the paths to juvenile delinquency that some of their peers were following. More than 60 percent of these adolescents had at least one parent who immigrated to the U.S., most from poor areas of Eastern and Western Europe and areas in or near the Middle East, such as Greater Syria and Turkey. Their modest roots and immigrant status made them doubly marginalized. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, a lawyer and a social worker, respectively, initiated this study in an attempt to understand which life factors prevented delinquency, and these boys had succeeded on that front.

Those children who had a complicated illness at birth, who had poor experiences with their caretakers, and who suffered abuse were more likely to have mental health problems and to develop learning disabilities. Their childhood experience really mattered.

But Werner also found reasons for hope. One third of all children who had adverse childhoods still managed to develop into attentive, kind, and emotionally well-adjusted adults. These kids overcame their difficult childhoods, and Werner was able to point to some of the reasons.

There were protective factors at work for some children that countered the effects of their difficult childhoods. One of the major sources of protection was the consistent presence of at least one caring adult. Even one person who is concerned, available, and emotionally invested in a child’s well-being can positively affect that child’s development and future relationships. Some of the children who thrived despite adversity seemed particularly able to elicit this kind of caring support.

In contrast, in Renick’s early years at GSU he knew of several low-income students who were dropped from school for not meeting only one small bureaucratic requirement, never to be heard from again. These kinds of experiences brought Renick to an important insight: Academic ability was rarely the reason low-income students dropped out of college. It was mostly little things, potholes along the road to graduation. As Andrew Grumbel put it in Won't Lose This Dream, his compelling book describing the transformation of GSU: “Contrary to conventional wisdom, academic performance was not the most important predictor of student success or failure.

Brilliant field studies by the MIT behavioural economist Sendhil Mullainathan and the Princeton cognitive psychologist Eldar Shafir, described in their book Scarcity, show that the scarcities of poverty (like those of time) can so focus one’s attention on immediate demands that little bandwidth is left for planning, learning about options, doing homework, and building relationships and cultural capital. The urgency of his sister’s having to rummage through garbage to find enough cans that his family could have milk and cereal at the same breakfast narrows Tyler’s bandwidth for school.