The Marshmallow Test: How Good is YOUR Self Control?

There it is. A Marshmallow.  Big, white, mushy, sweet yumminess staring your child right in the face– saying “eat me!”  Could your child resist if he knew he’d get two if he waited out the challenge? Would he eat it before the researcher even left the room?

Waiting…is hard.

The Marshmallow Test has been known as a classic way to test self control, patience and delayed gratification.  Think about it; If someone gave you one of your favorite treats and told you that you must continue to stare at it but not eat it for a preset amount of time– and if you succeed, you can have two of these treats– could you do it? Think of your favorite treat. How could you keep from indulging yourself? What distraction methods might you use?

Think it’s just about marshmallows? The Marshmallow Test given during childhood has been shown to predict patience and delayed gratification later on in life.

The initial goal of the experiment was to identify the mental processes that allowed some people to delay gratification while others simply surrendered.

According to Walter Mischel, a Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the famous “marshmallow experiment” which tested children’s ability to delay gratification, told the New Yorker just last year, “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television and you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows” (New Yorker, May 2009). He’s saying that as a child, if you can stay in control of yourself despite getting hot under the collar, then you will be more prepared as an adult to deal with challenges that come your way.

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, 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.

“Young kids are pure id,” Mischel says. “They start off unable to wait for anything—whatever they want they need. But then, as I watched my own kids, I marveled at how they gradually learned how to delay and how that made so many other things possible.”

Tagged as: Children, delayed gratification, Dr. Robyn Silverman, Marshmallow Test, parenting, patience, powerful words, self contol