Self control, and self interest, for children in care?
An interesting article crossed our desk this week.
It’s from The New Yorker, and it’s about self-control. Or rather, the ability or willingness of some people to delay gratification. The experiment, carried out in the 1960’s at Stanford University, put nursery school children in a room with a treat. The researcher offered that they could eat it straight away, but that if they waited until the researcher came back before eating it, they would get a second treat. A number of children successfully waited, and they used a number of mechanisms to take their focus off the treat sitting before them.
Over time, and with further analysis, the researcher ‘began to notice a link between the children’s academic performance as teenagers and their ability to wait for the second marshmallow’.
We quote: ‘ “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”’
This struck a chord with us. So many stories from children in care highlight how powerless and fearful they felt. So much of a skilled and loving parent’s task should be to teach children how to make situations work for them, to understand the ‘give and take’ or negotiations that they need to undertake for many reasons – safety, happiness, fulfilment, success. And if that kind of care and teaching is missing, how disadvantaged are these children in coping with life?
Often when a child in care comes to live with you, self-control will be an alien concept. They can be completely impulsive, fearful of change and dreadfully upset when any experience they are enjoying ends.
Nowdays, the degree of negotiation that goes on at our house makes us feel a bit like the United Nations. On occasion we have to invoke the ‘just do it’ creed. But after reading this article, we are pleased to see that the our child is well and truly working out how to make situations work for them.
It’s a good day when you see that sense of robustness and, to be frank, self-interest. There is plenty of time to teach them to put others first, but given their background, sometimes you have to actively teach them to put themselves first. They often miss because they are just struggling to survive.
So how do you start them on this path? Firstly, we show them how loving parents nurture their children. We show them how we could put them first above everything. They learn, sometimes for the first time in their lives, how it feels to have every need catered for. Through that they learn that they deserve it.
Second, offer them both a reason to do what you want them to do, and an understanding of the consequences. It takes time and it takes energy, and sometimes it will clearly be beyond their understanding and willpower. But they will began to learn how everything is connected, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and that their actions trigger different outcomes.
It’s from The New Yorker, and it’s about self-control. Or rather, the ability or willingness of some people to delay gratification. The experiment, carried out in the 1960’s at Stanford University, put nursery school children in a room with a treat. The researcher offered that they could eat it straight away, but that if they waited until the researcher came back before eating it, they would get a second treat. A number of children successfully waited, and they used a number of mechanisms to take their focus off the treat sitting before them.
Over time, and with further analysis, the researcher ‘began to notice a link between the children’s academic performance as teenagers and their ability to wait for the second marshmallow’.
We quote: ‘ “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”’
This struck a chord with us. So many stories from children in care highlight how powerless and fearful they felt. So much of a skilled and loving parent’s task should be to teach children how to make situations work for them, to understand the ‘give and take’ or negotiations that they need to undertake for many reasons – safety, happiness, fulfilment, success. And if that kind of care and teaching is missing, how disadvantaged are these children in coping with life?
Often when a child in care comes to live with you, self-control will be an alien concept. They can be completely impulsive, fearful of change and dreadfully upset when any experience they are enjoying ends.
Nowdays, the degree of negotiation that goes on at our house makes us feel a bit like the United Nations. On occasion we have to invoke the ‘just do it’ creed. But after reading this article, we are pleased to see that the our child is well and truly working out how to make situations work for them.
It’s a good day when you see that sense of robustness and, to be frank, self-interest. There is plenty of time to teach them to put others first, but given their background, sometimes you have to actively teach them to put themselves first. They often miss because they are just struggling to survive.
So how do you start them on this path? Firstly, we show them how loving parents nurture their children. We show them how we could put them first above everything. They learn, sometimes for the first time in their lives, how it feels to have every need catered for. Through that they learn that they deserve it.
Second, offer them both a reason to do what you want them to do, and an understanding of the consequences. It takes time and it takes energy, and sometimes it will clearly be beyond their understanding and willpower. But they will began to learn how everything is connected, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and that their actions trigger different outcomes.
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