This article (The New Yorker, May 18, 2009, pp. 26-32.) summarizes research on self-control in children and how that tends to predict success later in life. In the late 1960s, researchers showed four-year-old kids a marshmallow, and told them that they “could eat one marshmallow right away, or if they were willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, they could have two marshmallows when he returned.” Some kids ate the one marshmallow very soon, while 30% were able to wait until the researcher returned 15 minutes later—a very long time in the life of a four-year old.
When they followed up these kids twenty years later, they found that those who could delay for 15 minutes had an average S.A.T. score that was 210 points greater than those who delayed 30 seconds or less—a very substantial difference! They also had fewer behavioral problems, dealt with stressful situations and maintained friendships better, and were generally more successful.
The researchers found that the impatient children tended to stare right at the marshmallow and quickly gave in, sometimes before the researcher even left the room. However, the children who were able to delay had a crucial skill that the researchers described as the “strategic allocation of attention.” They distracted themselves by covering their eyes, turning away from the marshmallows, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, singing songs from Sesame Street, kicking the desk, pulling on their pigtails, etc.
To their credit, the researchers didn’t just assume that this was all due to genetic differences. (Some may be; other experiments with children as young as 19 months found differences in how they responded to separation anxiety. Some continued to cry when their mothers left the room, while others soon distracted themselves by playing with toys.) The researchers were particularly interested in “the substantial subset of people who failed the marshmallow test as four-year-olds but became high-delaying adults,” indicating that attention skills could be learned.
In subsequent experiments when they taught four-year-olds “a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the marshmallow is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—they dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes.” The researchers concluded, “Once you realize that willpower is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.” These experiments clearly indicate that “willpower” or “self-control” can be easily taught to small children.
This is yet another example of academic psychology discovering and confirming an aspect of what NLP has known and used for some time. In another report a couple of years ago, a study found that people who suffered from PTSD recovered much faster if they were asked to describe their traumatic experiences in “third person” language: “He was riding in an armored personnel carrier, when—” In order to describe events in this way, the person has to take a dissociated viewpoint and see those evens as an outside neutral observer—exactly what people are taught to do in the NLP phobia cure. (The comparison group reported their traumatic experience in “first person” language.)
