Let’s be honest: children sometimes suck at being patient.
I know mine do.
Unfortunately, their lack of patience and self-control can become contagious to us adults, too. I admit that I’m prone to snapping, “Just wait a minute!” when my kids are screaming because I take too long to cut their grapes.
And before I know it, it becomes this vicious cycle—my children’s impatience makes me impatient, which in turn makes them more impatient, until it spirals out of control.
I know I can’t indulge them when they whine instead of waiting quietly – like all parents, I do believe in teaching kids about self-control and delayed gratification.
But, the way I sometimes go about it isn’t quite right.
Instead of expecting 2- and 3-year-olds to magically acquire self-control skills overnight (that would be cool though, wouldn’t it?), I need to model and teach these skills to them.
Marshmallow Test: The Famous Study in Self-Control and Delayed Gratification
Psychologists have studied why some kids seem to excel at demonstrating self-control and delaying gratification, while others struggle for long time now. Have you heard of the famous “marshmallow test” conducted by Walter Mischel and a team of researchers at Stanford University in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s?
One by one, 4-year-old children were presented with a marshmallow and informed that they could either eat a marshmallow now, or wait 15 minutes and receive two marshmallows. Some children gobbled the marshmallow immediately, while others managed to wait the full 15 minutes and receive the reward of a second marshmallow.
[Note from Sumitha: Here is a video of the marshmallow test in action. It’s not from the original study, but captures the kids reactions sooooo well.]
The researchers continued to follow up with the children for the next several decades. They found that the 4-year-olds who had successfully waited for 15 minutes differed in significant ways from the children who couldn’t wait. Over the years, the children who had “passed” the marshmallow test developed the following characteristics:
- better emotional coping skills
- higher rates of educational attainment
- higher SAT scores
- lower BMI
- lower divorce rates
- lower rates of addiction
So, is the lesson that some people are born with better self-control, and that this trait determines their entire life trajectory?
Far from it.
The researchers continued to conduct a lot of variations on the marshmallow test. In some of their studies, more children were able to resist the siren call of the marshmallow — because the researchers taught them how.
Walter Mischel concluded that “preschoolers tended to wait longer when they were given effective strategies.”
In other words, self-control and delayed gratification are essential life skills — but they can be learned.
This finding is good news for us parents! It means that we can actually do something positive to teach our kids about delaying gratification.
So what was it that helped kids delay gratification? Based on my reading of the studies, here are the 5 research-tested strategies that I am trying with my own kids.
#1 Avoidance
When the researchers covered the marshmallow, the children didn’t need special strategies to avoid eating it. They just weren’t tempted when they couldn’t see it—thus proving the old proverb “out of sight, out of mind.”
So something as simple as hiding temptations from your children’s sight—whenever possible—is the most effective way to stop them from becoming overwhelming. Put chips and cookies away in the cupboard if you don’t want your children to whine for more. Stop checking Facebook all day on your iPad if you want your kids to limit screen time.
Removing temptation may sound like a cop-out, but as your children get older, you can explain the purpose of this strategy to them so that they can internalize it and start consciously doing it for themselves.
Some of the children in the original study spontaneously adopted this strategy by turning their backs to the marshmallow or covering their eyes—and sure enough, the children who adopted this strategy on their own were able to wait longer. So it’s an important skill for kids to learn.
#2 De-emphasis of Rewards
Parenting experts often tell us to dangle rewards before our children. I’m sure you’ve heard it before: “Don’t punish bad behavior—just reward good behavior!” When the going gets tough, we’re supposed to remind our children of the stickers and M&Ms that they want to earn.
But in the marshmallow test, the researchers found that children were less likely to wait when they were encouraged to think about the desirable properties of the reward (such as “the marshmallows are yummy and chewy”). Obsessing over the marshmallow made children want to eat it.
So if you want your child to wait patiently for a reward, don’t emphasize the reward that your child is waiting for. For instance, the next time you’re at the grocery store, don’t tell your children, “If you’re quiet, you can have a piece of delicious candy when we’re done.” Thinking about candy will make them want to grab all the candy they can well before they make it to the checkout line! Try a different strategy in a situation where you can’t give the reward right away.
#3 Positive Distraction
Children waited longer when the researchers told them to “think fun thoughts.”
Some of the children decided to “just sing a song” or “go to outer space.” Others distracted themselves by thinking of a different food—for instance, if they were trying not to eat a marshmallow, they talked about pretzels. In one version of the test, some children were given a Slinky to play with while they waited—and the majority of children with a Slinky successfully waited 15 minutes.
In another version, the researchers tried to distract the children by instructing them to think negative thoughts—for instance, to think about falling down and hurting themselves.
The children in this condition were terrible at waiting for the reward. The stress of the negative thoughts apparently led them to console themselves with the marshmallow. Thus, trying to distract children by reminding them of punishment or other negative consequences may backfire.
The lesson? Distraction can work, but it should be fun rather than stressful.
#4 Abstraction
Children waited longer when instructed to think of the marshmallow in an abstract way—for instance, as a picture, or as a cloud. Walter Mischel theorized that abstraction helped the children to “cool” their desires for the snack by emphasizing intellectual strategies over “hot” emotional reactions.
If your children focus on a temptation that you can’t hide or avoid, encourage them to consider the object’s abstract properties rather than its tempting properties. For instance, if they’re staring at the TV set, pleading for you to turn it on, ask them what shape it is and lead them on a scavenger hunt for similar shapes in the house. Or tell them to imagine it as a magic picture frame and ask what pictures they “see” in it.
But remember that the children in the original study were around 4.5 years old. This strategy probably works best with children age 4 and up, not with 18-month-olds who haven’t developed abstract thought yet.
#5 Self-directed Speech
Although researchers didn’t specifically instruct them in this strategy, some of the children chose to engage in self-directed speech in order to help themselves wait. They repeated phrases to themselves like “I have to wait, so I can get two marshmallows.” Engaging in self-directed speech correlated with longer wait times.
Parents should therefore teach phrases that are easy to repeat and that remind children to control their impulses. For instance, if you don’t want your child to beg for endless amounts of cookies, tell her in advance that she’ll only get one, and ask her to repeat the phrase “just one cookie” before you give it to her. Then, if she finds the limit to be stressful, she can repeat “just one cookie” to herself.
As you can see, these strategies aren’t particularly difficult to understand. They’re just as straightforward as teaching our children their ABCs—and may be even more fundamental to their academic success. If Mischel and his researchers were able to teach some kids to apply these strategies in a single 15-minute session, surely we can succeed with our own children.
The important part is to be consistent in applying them. Another psychologist who studies self-control has compared it to a muscle—which means that it can strengthen with exercise.
By helping our children apply their best self-control strategies to delay gratification in everyday situations, we help them to develop better self-control overall.
The 2-Minute Action Plan for Fine Parents
- Examine your children’s self-control issues. When do your children experience difficulties with being patient or delaying gratification? Create a plan using one or more of these strategies (avoidance, de-emphasis of rewards, distraction, abstraction, or self-directed speech) to mitigate these difficult situations for them.
- Examine your own self-control issues. Children ultimately learn best from imitating their parents, not from nagging or commands. So modeling these strategies yourself is a great way to teach them to your children.
- In which areas do you have problems with self-control? Invent a plan using one or more of these strategies to help yourself! Let’s say you routinely find yourself glued to your phone at the park, even though you’ve made resolutions to run around with the kids and get some exercise. Maybe you could invent a phrase to remind yourself to get off the phone (“two minutes, and then I put the phone away”). Plan to repeat the phrase to yourself and even teach the kids to remind you of it. You might develop a back-up plan using a different strategy in case the first one fails. If a self-directed phrase doesn’t help you step away from the phone, you could plan to leave it at home or at the bottom of your purse (out of sight, out of mind).
The Ongoing Action Plan for Fine Parents
- Over the next week, implement your strategies for improving self-control both in your children and in yourself. Which strategies seem to work best for your children? Which ones work best for you?
- Some strategies might completely backfire—and that’s ok. For instance, I’ve learned that distraction doesn’t work for my 2-year-old son. If I try to distract him with a toy when he’s fixated on some forbidden item, he screams and throws the unwanted toy in my face. Over time, however, children may become developmentally ready for more sophisticated strategies, so keep an open mind and reevaluate strategies later that didn’t seem to work at first. I’ll try distraction again when my son is older, but right now it’s not going to be my “go-to strategy” when I really want him to behave.
- Discern which strategies are most effective and practice those ones the most. My 2-year-old benefits most from avoidance, especially removing him to a different room, so I find myself doing this several times a day (or sometimes several times an hour, on a rough day). I hope that as we continue to implement these strategies, those rough days will eventually become few and far between.
Great article on such an important topic. Thank you for breaking it down so well, lot of strategies here to try!
Thanks, Ashley. I love all kinds of studies that show we parents can do something proactive about instilling some of these character traits in our kids. I love how Sarah broke it up too and am so happy for the opportunity to publish it!
What an awesome check in! Some of these I have been doing, but several I would have never even considered. Great article!
“Check-in” — I love that perspective, Ashley! It gives me a new way to think of what I want to publish here on this site and how I hope it will impact the parents who read them!
And thanks for your kind words about the article as well 🙂
“And before I know it, it becomes this vicious cycle—my children’s impatience makes me impatient, which in turn makes them more impatient, until it spirals out of control.”
Isn’t that the truth! This is a great resource. Thank you.
Right? And this happens to be the case not just with sibling rivalry, but with everything I do. Sigh! Which is why I need to go on an intentional fine parenting journey and run his blog so I can break out of the vicious cycle, one itty-bit at a time 🙂
Hi!
Great article! I always enjoy reading anything you post 🙂
I have an almost 4 year old daughter and a 5 year old son.
My God, they’re a handful!
My son is really really really impatient… even when he wants to talk… he keeps yelling mama mama mama until I say ‘Yes, Rohan mommy’s listening’… but it’s really annoying when he does that… He knows that he has to say ‘Excuse me, can I say something’ and he’s suppose to wait until the other person is ready to listing to him… but he is so impatient that he keeps saying ‘excuse me, excuse me, excuse me’… I have tried calming him by really paying attention to him.. talking to him… but nothing seems to work…
Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Hmm, I haven’t encountered that problem before. Here are a few ideas off the top of my head:
1) Maybe the phrase “excuse me, can I say something?” is just too long for him to remember when he’s excited. You could try condensing it into something easier for him.
2) You could try some kind of physical reminder like a “talking stick” that you just hand to him, so he knows he has your full attention and can calm down.
3) You could talk to his teacher at school and figure out what methods they use there to get kids to talk calmly. If they work for him there, they might work at home too.
Awww, thanks for the wonderful complement, Soenita — you just made my day! 🙂
I think Sarah’s tips above are excellent — it is definitely the way to go.
That said, I’m feeling a bit like the devil’s advocate today, so I’m going to suggest something evil… it’s up to you whether you want to try it 🙂
My daughter used to have a habit of interrupting me constantly while I was on a call or watching TV — basically any time she did not have my full attention. I tried many positive parenting suggestions like giving her more attention at other times, explaining calmly etc. None of it seemed to work. Then I realized that she does not grasp or a concept of how annoying it is to be interrupted.
So one day when she was totally immersed watching TV, I started interrupting her in good humor and kept interrupting her until she was almost annoyed. And then I told her that is how mama feels when she interrupts mama. I think that got the point across. She still sometimes forgets and interrupts me, but instead of getting mad or lecturing, I just excuse myself from the call, get down to her level and ask her “Do you remember how being interrupted feels? I’ll be done with the call in 5 minutes and then I’m all yours. Deal?” and that takes care of it. Maybe you can try interrupting your son (in a playful manner, with a LOT of empathy, intentionally making sure there is no meanness) while he is in a conversation with a friend or his dad/grandparents so he gets a taste for what that feels like?
I did that once with my daughter and lying when she was about 3 or 4, where I told her I was going to lie to her for a week and see how she liked it. At first she seemed excited by the challenge, but by the end of a few hours of not being able to trust me anymore she asked if we could please stop and she understood why lying was a problem. Worked for a little while anyway!
I think that may be where I might have got the idea from !!! I remember you mentioned this story when I spoke to you while putting together the article about lying. I wonder it that somehow found it’s way into what I did with my kid, without quite paying attention to it. You may be a good influence on me, Korinthia (though I think my daughter might disagree, especially that time when I was bugging relentlessly her while she was trying to watch TV) 😉
This is a topic I haven’t thought about much because I think my children must be weirdly patient. I have no idea why. But I’ve found in general that they do best with temptation when the expectations are very clear. We live two blocks from Target and go there sometimes daily. From as early as they could understand we always explained before we went in that we were “Just picking up milk” (or whatever) and that they weren’t getting anything. So they never ask. I think a lot of successful parenting strategies come down to simply being clear and consistent, and that can extend in ways to delayed gratification, too.
Honestly here, my first reaction is to jump up and say, “No, it’s not true… my daughter is inherently more “strong-willed” and stubborn…” etc. But when I settle down and think a bit, I have to agree with you.
A close friend of mine has 2 kids. The older one is the same age as my daughter and they have polar opposites personalities… his level-headedness is as stark as my daughter’s volatility. But the second child is a lot more like my daughter – he knows his mind, has strong opinions about he wants and cannot be easily dissuaded. My friends are very mellow parents and I can see how that influences the way he eventually responds to a situation (even though he starts out very similar to how my daughter would have in the same situation at that age). I think it’s a constant tug of nature and nurture. In some cases they are very complementary (perhaps that’s your situation?). In others, nature poses more challenging situations, and nurture will either make it significantly worse, or counter-balance it to create some sense of equilibrium. We started out with the former – my “parenting style” making my daughter more stubborn, less *willing* to have self-discipline etc. But now, with a bit of a conscious effort, we’re moving more towards counter-balancing each other… my parenting helping her control her nature (instead of letting it rule her) and in turn, her behavior balances out my nature (allowing me to be more nurturing).
PS: About Target trips… my daughter is 6+ now, and only recently I’ve started taking her with me when we go shopping for gifts for her friends. When she was younger, no matter how much I tried, I could not take her gift shopping for others without her feeling slighted that I chose to buy something for others while not buying something for her (and I refuse to buy a gift for her every time I buy a gift for someone else, no matter how small it is). However, on the day of the birthday party, when I just produced the gift out of the closet and started wrapping, it she was much more amenable to the idea of giving it away without feeling the need to demand one for herself. Maybe the deluge of temptation at the store was too much for her to handle? (Or I was less able to handle it in a public place?). Either ways, until recently, the best thing for us was avoidance. Now that she is older, she can go with me and help me pick out the gift (most of the time, anyway 😉 )
I love this topic! When my son gets inpatient, it certainly makes me crazy:) One way we’ve worked on delaying gratification is with money.
When at the store, I get so tempted to buy my son that pack of gum, or whatever small item he wants. But we’ve started giving him an allowance so he has the freedom and responsibility to buy his own stuff.
The flip side, of course, is when he spends all of his money – it’s gone (this is where delayed gratification comes in).
For example, he wanted to purchase Minecraft for the PC. It was $26, and easy for us to purchase. But we offered to match him dollar for dollar to save up. It took a month (of waiting!), but when he did it, he felt so awesomely proud.
It was totally worth it.
This is easier with older kids (my son is 8), but just another strategy/tool:)
That’s nice, Nicki! We’ve tried allowances a few times since my daughter was 4, but somehow it hasn’t quite clicked for us yet (she is 6 now). I will try it again when she is a little older. I particularly like the idea of matching funds dollar-for-dollar to encourage them to save up for bigger items… will definitely be giving it a try some day. Thanks for the idea 🙂
Being a sociology student, I couldn’t help but question whether almost all of the advice should be contrasted in order to get children to be mentally stronger. For example, rather than using the strategy of avoidance, they would be mentally stronger if they were tempted into having the marshmallow almost to the extreme, whereby after the 15 minutes given another marshmallow. Again, would making the children think about the ‘reward’ rather than distracting them make them mentally stronger? Just a thought, I also appreciate that they’re only 4 years old.
Oh and for the record, I’m not a parent.
Great article! I’m studying self-control in children for my master’s thesis and those 5 tips are really good ideas! I tried following the links to get more information and read the original studies that the ideas are based off of, but none of the links worked. Any way to get the references for them? Thanks!