Op-ed: Self control, success and marshmallows part 1

By Penina Zilberberg

Issue of September 10, 2010/ 2 Tishrei 5771

It’s the Sunday before the start of school. You’re inching down Central Avenue in heavy traffic looking for parking with your hungry, cranky preschool kids in the back seat. The plan: lunch, then shoes, then a backpack, then whatever your kids’ teachers decided to add to the school supply list at the last minute. As you try to concentrate on finding that elusive spot amid the whining from the back of the car, one of your children holds up a lint covered lollypop that he managed to extract from the nether regions of your car and asks “Can I have a lolly?” Your child knows that there is no eating before lunch, and violating that rule means no ice cream for dessert. But your child is hot and hungry. And he’s four.

How to respond? While we all understand the importance of setting limits and being consistent with our children, the reality is that giving in, especially in moments like these, is often the only way to get things done. However, there may be a lot more at stake in that hectic moment than you might think.

For a long time, there has been a lot of attention on IQ or raw intelligence as the most important variable that predicts future success in life. This seemed logical enough; if one was lucky enough to inherit strong genes for intelligence, he would have the ability or potential to learn quickly, retain what he learned, use prior knowledge to negotiate novel situations and be successful. But what if I told you that another characteristic is even more important than intelligence? According to research done by Walter Mischel at Stanford University beginning in the 1960’s, the ability to delay gratification, or self-control, can be even more important than raw intelligence. In fact, a person’s intelligence can be disabled or limited by his or her inability to delay gratification.

Mischel designed a simple study to assess the ability of young children to delay gratification: 4-year-old children were left in a room with one marshmallow and were told that if they wanted to eat the marshmallow, they could (immediate gratification), but if they could wait until the researcher returned, they would get two marshmallows instead (a better reward later; delayed gratification). About one third of the children ate the marshmallow right away; about one third tried to wait, but ended up eating it before the researcher returned; and about one third were able to wait the 15 minutes, and got the extra reward. Not very surprising. Any parent knows that some children can delay gratification and some simply can’t. What is surprising, however, is the association of this ability with success later on in life. Follow-up on those same children decades later revealed that the group that could not delay their eating of the marshmallow, struggled later in life when faced with stress and challenges, were less likely to achieve long-term goals, and were more likely to have higher body-mass-index, or to be overweight. In contrast, the group of children who were able to delay had SAT scores that were higher by an average of 210 points, and had better careers.

If we think for a moment about what the ability to delay gratification means, these results shouldn’t surprise us. Delaying gratification is to ignore the reward you can get right now (it may be food, a game, or some other pleasant reward) in order to get something even better later. Success in life — be it obtaining a medical degree, developing and perfecting an artistic talent, starting a business or building a strong family — depends to a large part on the ability to delay immediate pleasure for your ultimate goal. Mischel’s study is simply telling us that a child who tends to do what is easier or more fun and, say, skip homework for more TV time, is more likely to avoid the hard work necessary to accomplish anything of value as an adult.

If the child who is able to delay his gratification, or wait for a reward, is more likely to grow into a self-confident and successful adult than the child who seems unable to do so, what does this mean to us, as parents? Are our brains “hard-wired” so that we are destined to be either gluttonous failures or disciplined superstars? In other words, are self-control and the ability to delay gratification genetically determined? The marshmallow study hinted at a possible answer. It turns out that the children who successfully delayed eating the marshmallow did not simply stare at it for 15 minutes. Instead, what separated the delayers from the non-delayers was their use of strategies, such as turning their chair around so they were not looking at it, covering their eyes, singing songs, and other self-distraction techniques. The children who did better were the ones who had an understanding of self-control; they understood that they needed to put their attention elsewhere. Furthermore, when the researchers suggested that the children use strategies, such as pretending it was a picture of a marshmallow instead of an actual edible marshmallow, those children were better able to delay.

This suggests that the children who succeeded at the test knew something the other kids didn’t. And if that’s the case, it suggests further that parents have the power to teach their kids techniques and strategies to help them develop this crucial character trait. Some of these techniques and strategies will be the topic of a future column.

Dr. Penina Zilberberg is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in children and adolescents with a private practice in Cedarhurst, NY. She can be reached at penina.zilberberg@gmail.com.