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Self-control and delayed gratification
In the most recent New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer has an interesting article called Don't!: The Secret of Self-Control. Central to the article is the work of Walter Mischel, in particular an experiment at a Stanford nursery school in the late 1960s. The basic experiment was this: young children were offered some treat that they liked, but they were told that they could either eat it right away or if they could wait while the experimenter stepped out of the room, they could have two. They looked at how long kids could delay gratification.
Mischel's work has focused on the ability to delay gratification. Since his own daughter was part of the nursery school and experiments, he kept very loose tabs on some of the kids involved in the experiment and saw what appeared to be a correlation between the children's ability at a young age to delay gratification and their success in school, so he looked more rigorously and, in fact, that appeared to be the case. They
seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.
It seems, in fact, that no character trait--not personality type, not IQ--correlates so well as the ability to delay gratifiaction with success in school and beyond.
Apparently, there's evidence suggesting a genetic component to this, but clearly some of the ability to delay gratification is learned as well, requiring
years of diligent practice. “This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says. “Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?” According to Mischel, even the most mundane routines of childhood—such as not snacking before dinner, or saving up your allowance, or holding out until Christmas morning—are really sly exercises in cognitive training: we’re teaching ourselves how to think so that we can outsmart our desires.
I can see in my students, often self-control and the ability to delay gratification are exactly the characteristics that are missing in the students who don't do as well. Right now we're in the midst of a thing called Spring Schedule, where all classes are finished by 12:30, so after lunch finishes at 1, most students have a fair bit of free time. Even with all this extra time--in fact, quite possibly because of the extra time--we have a number of students failing to finish their homework or prepare for tests. They don't lack time, they just lack the discipline to do their work in the time they have.
I think in some ways, I had a good education in delayed gratification. As a kid, my parents rarely gave me toys that I asked for when I asked for them, and sometimes not at all. I think also, though, and related to this, that I had to exercise self-control more generally while I was growing up. For instance, my parents were very much in the kids-must-learn-to-sit-still-in-church school. And I did. Many of my relatives were older and I remember being told that I had to be on my best behavior when we visited because rambunctious children made them nervous. So I had to learn self-control.
As an only child, I also had to self-entertain. I had lots of practice in that, and in part that led me to be as much of a reader as I long have been. Reading itself, of course, is a sort of self-control, an enforced sitting-still and focusing. Practicing the piano at that age probably also contributed, though I was never a particularly disciplined practitioner of the pianistic arts. Even the practice I did very likely had a positive effect.
I think I've mentioned it before, but for the better part of a school year as an undergrad, my best friend and I practiced fasting once a week as an exercise in self-control. Once a week, we'd have nothing but water, a feat of self-control that became fairly easy after a while.
That said, I probably couldn't do it now. I think probably in one way and another the self-control that I'd built has eroded over the past ten years. Such things are largely matters of habit, and, well, some of my habits are better than others.