Kids & Delayed Gratification

While it is normal for a toddler not to have the ability to resist a treat left available to them it is interesting to note that by four years old 30% of them do. As do most adults.  How can this difference be explained?  The reason is that the prefrontal cortex has barely started developing in a two year old. It will reach maturity around the age of 25.  So the key lies in strengthening the prefrontal cortex through practice. How is this done?

Remember that children can learn anxiety from parents.  How do you normally react whenever your child climbs up high into a tree?  If you can get yourself to calmly guide your child down the tree in such a way that your child also stays calm, you are busy teaching your child self-control.  Situations like these enable a child to create the brain pathways to take her through difficult situations in future.  If you anxiously scream at your child and in doing so also make your child feel anxious, in a similar situation, the child might end up feeling incompetent and learns that anxiety cannot be managed. Such a child may learn to rush in and take impulsive action rather than making use of an ability to regulate him/herself to make rational decisions.

Whenever children volunteer to give up something they want in exchange for something they want more, they are building the neural pathways in their frontal cortex associated with self-discipline.  This happens only when it is the child’s own goal. However, when a child is forced to do this, such a child is neither taught nor developing self-discipline.   When we set a limit that our child accepts, such a child is developing and practicing self-control. 

Self-discipline can be described as the ability to manage ourselves in order to reach our goals.  The well-known Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow Experiment, was used to test how long a child can resist easting a treat, if it means that child will get two treats if they are able to resist eating the one treat for a certain period of time.  In other words he tested the ability of children to have self-discipline to control their impulses in order to meet certain goals.    The bad news is that our self-control as a four year old seems to predict the self-discipline we will have later in life.  But don’t see the die as already cast at age four.  The good news is that our brain is like a muscle, it has the ability to strengthen throughout life. It all depends on how it is trained and used.  Parents who set empathic limits, who are emotionally responsive, who model good emotional regulation and encourage their children to pursue their passions, will raise children who are self-disciplined. This can be true regardless of whether a child passed the marshmallow test or not at the age of four.