A few weeks ago, I was listening to my favorite "science is cool" radio show, RADIO LAB and decided to put on my lab coat and use Luke as a guinea pig. Don't worry, there were no muscle biopsies, blood samples or extremely intense bike time trials. Instead it involved cookies.
The program I listened to had an interview from Columbia University psychologist Walter Mischel. In the 1960s, Mischel tested hundreds of 4-year-olds with marshmallows and Oreo cookies and found some very interesting stuff about willpower and delayed gratification.
Mischel put a 4-year-old in a room alone with a marshmallow or a cookie on a table and told the child he was going to leave the room. He said told the child not to eat the cookie, and if they waited until he got back, they could have two cookies.
Some kids ate the cookies right away, and others waited. One day he was talking with his daughter a few years later (who was used in the study along with many of her friends) and was asking how Jenny or Bobby was doing. He noticed that the kids who resisted the treat were doing better than the kids who ate the cookie. So he did a follow up study and found that the kids who showed self control had better SAT scores, had more education, were more healthy - all kinds of crazy things.
So, with Luke being 4, I decided to give it a try. I was a little afraid - what if he ate the cookie?
I put the cookie in front of him, gave him the speech, walked away, and with a sigh of relief, heard him singing "Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?". Great strategy - distraction. After about 15 minutes, I told him he was all done, he could have an ice cream sandwich, and that I expect great things out of him.
Disclaimer: if you listen to the interview of Mischel, he will be the first to tell you that there are always outliers, and that if a child eats a cookie, it really doesn't mean that your child is doomed to a certain path. He also talks about how you can teach your children certain self control strategies. So you can tell your kids you expect great things out of them, whether or not they eat the cookie.
