Ahem… Sorry about last week's blog neglect. Many forces conspired against us and, well, you know how it is.  But upward and onward!

This week's topic was inspired by a recent questions sent in by a reader:

I was wondering if you could also address the development of
inhibition/delay gratification in children? So there's all this
literature linking children's ability to forgo immediate gratification
and later success in life. But when is it a good time to start
fostering the ability to delay gratification? I'm asking because I
don't quite know whether to say no to my 12-month-old when he wants to
mooch off of us (on healthy foods, mind you – like cheese, crackers,
fruit, our dinner). E.g., he'll have eaten a good sized dinner while
we cook, and once we sit down to eat (we give him nibbles – peas,
carrots, etc), he wants to eat off of our plates. Another example:
He'll just have drank 7 oz of milk and I'm getting myself a snack of
hummus and pita, and he basically points at my food and makes noises
at me ("Ba? Ma?" looks at food, looks at me, points) until I give him
something. Is my behaviour just going to foster an inability to delay
gratification, or is he too young for that to even matter?

GREAT question! This is such a HUGE field of research. The question hits on the science of inhibition, executive functioning (basically, cognitive control), emotion regulation, attention difficulties, and so on. So, this is my not-so-subtle way of saying there is NO WAY I can cover that whole area in one or even 5 posts. But let's explore the topic from various angles this week.

The first thing that lept to mind when I read this question was that the reader gives the example of fostering control in her child in a context that deals with food. I'm going to bet that it's because she's read, heard or watched something about the famous psychologist Walter Mischel's research. One of his most famous experiments began in the 1960s and it is well-known as the "marshmallow experiement." The experiment goes like this: Preschool children, one by one, are asked to come into a room that is bare and boring (in which there is also a hidden video camera). The experimenter places one plump marshmallow in front of the child and says, "You can eat this now or, if you wait 15 min and DON'T eat it, you'll get TWO marshmallows to eat later." Then the experimenter leaves the room for (up to) FIFTEEN MINUTES (can you IMAGINE the craziness that this must put most preschoolers in?). The researchers documented how long it took for kids to take a bite out of the marshmallow. Most took a bite around the 3 min mark, way before the 15 min were up; a small proportion of kids actually made it all the way through and somehow managed to resist the temptation. Then a decade and more later, the researchers went back to get data on the grown-up versions of these children (I think they're up to 18 or 20 years later by now). The extent to which preschoolers were able to delay their gratification (so, the number of seconds before they ate the marshmallow or the extent to which they could actually wait all the way through for a "bigger" prize) predicted INSANE stuff, not the least of which was SAT scores and self-control abilities in adolescence and adulthood. Here's one link to the empirical paper of the adolescent follow-up (as usual, with some of these original articles, I can't directly link to the whole paper, just the abstract). And here's a nice summary of the study from The New Yorker.

The experiment has been replicated a bazillion times on various news shows and youtube clips. I'd like to actually point you to my favourite discussion of the topic — I think it could foster some interesting discussions. It is TOTALLY worth your 15 min to listen to this (there are very few things I'd say this about to very, very busy parents). I'm a HUGE RadioLab fan and here's the link to the show they did in which they interviewed Walter Mischel, described the "marshmallow experiment," and summarized some of the coolest findings and their implications. 

We'll talk next about what we can do as parents to foster our children's abilities to delay gratification, which was more to the point of the original question from our reader. We'll also try to consider what might be developmentally appropriate expectations to have about self-control (which I also think is at the heart of the reader's question: a one-year old is a very different story from a 5 year old in this context). Really, we're talking about will power and general self-control here, in its various complex forms. And as much as I KNOW it's a good thing for us to help our children with controlling their impulses, I also know that I, for one, would have gobbled the marshmallow up in the first few seconds it was placed in front of me.

What about you? Would you have waited for the second gooey marshmallow on the horizon or would you just have said f%$# it! and gone for it? What do you think your child would do? Check out some of these INSANELY cute kids and watch how difficult it really can be (this isn't from the original sample, but it captures the feel of the experiment nicely).

– Isabela