Speaker 1Hello and welcome to the How Not to Screw Up Your Kids podcast. So, pour yourself a cuppa, find a comfy seat and enjoy the conversation. In today's episode, I want to talk about self-control and its crucial role in predicting our children's success in adulthood. Now, before I dig in, I want to give you some context about what made me choose this particular focus for this episode and focusing really on this singular skill. Now, I don't know about you, but I've been watching the World Athletic Championships in Tokyo, very keen interest in that, and I find myself always massively in awe of these incredible humans as they compete, top of their game and with every ounce of grit and determination. Even those, I don't know if you've heard of them, but I don't know if you've heard of them, but I don't know even those, I don't know if you've heard of them, but I don't know if you've heard of them, but I don't know if you've heard of them, but I don't know even those, I don't know if you've heard of them, but I don't know if you've heard of them, but I don't know if you've heard of them, but I don't know even those, I don't know if you've heard of them, but I don't know on a plate, was a marshmallow. So the researcher was then like, I need to leave the room. And the child was given a choice. So they could eat that single marshmallow immediately, eat it now, enjoy it, love it. Or they could wait for this researcher, the experimenter, to come back. And if they could wait until the experimenter came back, they would get two instead of the one. So it's about, do I wait or do I not wait? So, and the experimenter left for about 15 minutes and they recorded how the children were in that room, obviously to see whether they ate it or they didn't. But also what was super interesting was for the children who did, who were able to wait, they got a whole load of knowledge about what do these children do in those 15 minutes before the researcher came back. So, and basically what the researchers were looking at was, can the child delay gratification? What strategies does the researcher use? What strategies does the researcher use to delay gratification? And, or did they delay or did they, they do that? Now the study wasn't set up for delaying gratification. It was set up on this premise of does willpower, which I think is a different kind of concept, but does willpower predict not only how a child behaves in that moment. So if a child has the willpower to wait for two marshmallows, what does that do in terms of predicting their life outcomes later? So that's in essence what the study looked at. And it looked at the participants over a considerable number of years. It sort of looked at them in terms of adulthood and so that they could see what those outcomes were. It has its criticism, and I'm going to come back to some of these, but the original study, and it has been copied, it's what they call replicated, and similar findings have been found, but they've tweaked how they've interpreted those findings. But basically the original study looked at, in the follow-up, studies, when they looked at these children again, as they kind of went through their lives and into adulthood, what the delaying and the willpower did, and it predicted, remember this is a US study. So those who waited, who were able to wait longer for the second marshmallow, they had higher SAT scores, they coped better with stress, they had better social skills, and they were less likely to become overweight. Those were just some of the measures that they had to take. So that's the idea of willpower. But what happened was, as Michelle did more and more studies and other researchers focused and repeated the study with similar results, they found that there were some crucial factors. And these are the factors that I just want to highlight before we move in to my strategies, because for me, it just confirms this idea that it's a skill that we want to be helping our children with. And one of the factors that came out of it was this idea about cognitive skills. Cognitive is simply how you can control your brain. It's the kind of intellectual skills. It's what psychologists call intellectual skills. And what they found was the children that were waiting, obviously, for the second marshmallow and did manage to exercise this willpower, they used different distraction techniques, such as singing. Some children covered their eyes to make sure that they didn't see by not looking at it. Some swiveled their chair and turned their back on it. But in essence, what you're doing is, they used intellectual skill sets in order to resist this temptation and extend their willpower. So we know, you know, the study was originally set up for willpower, but we know that children who can exercise and be creative in their intellectual problem solving, that's in essence what they were doing. I've got a problem. I've got to wait for this second marshmallow. And I need to be creative and find ways that work for me to make sure that I'm not tempted. I don't do what I don't want to do, which is to eat that first marshmallow because I want to have two. So that's one factor. Now, what we have to remember with this particular study for the second factor is that there were children from all different walks of life. And so one of the factors that they found was this environmental trust. And I'm just going to kind of explain this in the context of the reality for us as parents is that if our children learn through that by delaying something, there is always something better at the end of it. So there's an element of things can be reliable, then they're much more likely to exercise that delaying gratification. So some of these children obviously didn't delay gratification because they were raised in environments that were unpredictable and unreliable. So their value system and their experiences in life had led them to believe that actually I can't rely on this experimenter who is saying that I'm going to get more because actually what I need to do in my life has shown that I can't rely on people, that things are not always as they say they are going to be. And therefore, that's why I need to take this marshmallow now because there may not be two marshmallows when the researcher comes back. So that predictability. So it's just that remembering that factor when we work with our children is that if we can provide that predictability, if our children learn time and something, but just then learning that over time, playing the long game is always better for me than playing the short game that that happens. And the other factor that they found was this idea about context cues. So when they repeated some of the studies and found that if children were not seeing the temptation, they were much better at delaying gratification. So again, it's understanding how that might play out, which we'll look at within the tips. So the whole idea about this was that if I have a child who can really exercise great willpower, can I therefore then predict that that child will do better in adulthood than a child that can't? And there's been some controversy about whether it can actually predict, but what is very clear about this study and why it's so relevant to this self-control and the strategies we're going to talk about is that self-control is a skill that can be taught, which is why we're having this conversation and why I'm going to be in all aspects of the regulation piece, the managing the impulse piece and the working towards long-term goals. So that's all of the context and it's all helpful. And hopefully that has made it easier for you to understand. And now we're going to take a quick pause for a word from our sponsors.
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Speaker 1is children are much more likely to do what we ask them when we can keep our instructions really simple, really clear. The language is direct and we take out all of the superfluous extra bits that just pad it out with our emotion and our frustration. So it's like just simple things like, you know, finish your work and then you get to play. We take turns sharing toys. We tidy up, we make our bed before we come down to breakfast. Anything where we really take an instruction and rather than padding out the frustration, like, oh, I forgot to say, why are your clothes always on the floor in your bedroom? Just tidy up. Instead, it's clothes on the floor need to be in wardrobe. Just keep it super simple and really clarify. So our children have, there's no ambiguity. We don't get caught up in this emotional piece. And they know exactly what we're doing. We can have longer conversations if we're finding that our children are not exercising those aspects of self-control and self-discipline and the values that we have specifically when we're thinking about what we expect from them around the house. That's a separate conversation in the moment. Keep it really short, sharp and clear, and then have longer conversations at a less emotionally charged moment of, look, I've noticed that there seems to be a problem. I've noticed that there seems to be a problem. We're constantly at loggerheads and we're battling around keeping our bedrooms tidy. Let's have a conversation about this. So we can have a longer conversation, but in the moment, keep it short and sharp. Talk about feelings when we have this communication piece and this regulating the link between our thoughts, our feelings, and therefore our actions. Let's have those conversations about our feelings. Let's talk about our feelings. Let's help our children expand their emotional balance. Let's talk about our emotions. Let's talk about our best ways to do that is games. So I know it's one of those things that life gets super, super busy and we're juggling multiple things that we don't always have the time to play games, but games can be like so helpful for so many things. And so whether that is one of the games that I've talked about in previous episodes, um, in terms of turn-taking is where you use a wooden spoon and whoever has the wooden spoon is the person who can communicate. So they're the person that can speak. If you don't have the wooden spoon, you have to wait for your turn to have that wooden spoon. And you can make your own rules about how this works, about whether that you have to gesture, whether you have to put your hand up, however you do that, that teaches and that flexes this, this ability to manage our impulse. I want to say something and I want to say it immediately, but I know I need to take my turn. I need to wait for that. So I think you can do that. You can use all sorts of board games that encourage and promote that idea of turn-taking, but it also helps with emotional regulation when they lose, when they're frustrated because things are not quite going their way. That could be brilliant. So it's really looking at, can we, okay, maybe we can't do that on a, on a normal school week because that's too tricky. So instead, can we look at bringing in board games and games and cooperation things at the weekends? Can we do that? So that's one way we can help our children practice those skills. The second is about creating a way for them to be able to do that. The third is about creating opportunities for our children to make choices. We want to give them within reasonable limits. Remember, we've got the parameters with which we, our children are going to operate within, but we want to give them that ability to make choices, whether it's what they're wearing, choices of the vegetables that they have with their meal, what they're going to play with, how they might organize, you know, we might have an end goal of being in bed with lights about the, the non-negotiable things that need to happen before they go to bed so that they can feel that sense of empowerment about making choices and how those choices play out towards that end goal, which is to be in bed by 7.30 or whatever that might be, that we give them more of those choices. And then the other piece is about ways that we can help our children manage those impulse control and the delay and gratification is about, can we take a complex task? Now to you, it might not seem like a complex task. It might not seem like a complex task. We've simply asked our children to brush their teeth, for example, but to a child that's quite complex because what we're asking them to do is move away from something that they're really enjoying into a state probably that is neutral to then move towards something that they don't want to do. So can we break down tasks and make them into small manageable bite-sized micro steps that our children can then flex and repeat and practice regularly? Because what then happens is they experience success. We reward them with our verbal praise, our brilliant descriptive praise. It's amazing that you did, being really clear about that. So we can break that down. And then that means that our child experiences success. And then that helps them feel more able and more capable to do more complex tasks. So just thinking about complexity doesn't have to be, I'm making a very big demand on my child. Complexity is about am I asking my child to do something that is beyond their capability right now? Yeah, we might be caught in this, for goodness sake, Mary Han, they're six years old. I shouldn't be having to ask them to brush their teeth. Step back. For my child, are they able to switch from a task that they are really enjoying to therefore do a task that they are not going to enjoy, which is brushing their teeth? Have they demonstrated regularly that they can do this, not only with brushing their teeth, but other areas where I have not had to be encouraging them and or cajoling them? If the answer is no, then it's a complex skill for your child. Break it down, make it smaller, simple steps, and then praise them along that way. It's not going to happen overnight. But if we can break these things down, and we can do these with a lot of these, what is difficult for our children to do, the payback is massive on some of the more high stakes things that we might feel are more high stakes. Such as getting on with their work or their academic aspirations. So it's really stripping it back. It's not what we think is complex. It's actually what is complex to my child. And it has nothing to do with how old they are, but what skills they have. This is why I love this skills approach is because it's all about where is my child on that skills acquisition path? And what can I do to help scaffold that to help them get there? So that's how we can provide those opportunities. And then it's about remembering that we're not going to be able to do it alone. Remembering that our role, you know, in this building that is rising, which is our children, is our role is to be that guide, that coach, that mentor, that scaffolding for that potential falling masonry or timber, so that our children can then flourish. So it's about helping our children instead of avoiding difficult situations, which our children often want to do. It's how can we be there as a guide and a mentor, not a lecturer, not a this is what we're going to do, what you need to do, but how can we talk about the challenge that they're facing and that they would rather avoid, break it down into its constituent parts, talk about how our child might be able to approach that. So problem solving skills and being there to help them take those small steps up that ladder towards success and using reflection. You know, I love reflection. You know, I love this reflective piece, whether that's a reflective diary that is, a gratitude diary, whether that's a reflective piece about I'm finding this situation difficult, or I don't want to do that, reflecting on experiences in the past and how they might then use skills in that. But reflection as a tool is really important. So encouraging our children just to take their foot off the gas a little bit, just take a moment, just to pause, to contemplate, to consider, and then make a plan. And then of course, using that positive, reinforcement through that incredible descriptive praise. where we really hone in on what our child has done in a particular moment and what they've demonstrated that we is so powerful and so good because by reinforcing it that way through that positive descriptive praise we don't get into the long lecturing of our child like this is what i want you to do because they're getting that through that verbal reinforcement and that praise and then the final thing that i would say is we want to be able to create and build our children's toolbox whether that's a physical box that has things in that helps them when they experience these big emotions or whether it's a set of sort of metaphorical psychological tools that we talk about that help them in those moments of regulating those those thoughts those emotions and therefore then that that behavior so they learn and they flex and they build the skills to pause to take that moment to then learn how they can self-regulate you after we've helped them with that process that journey we co-regulate for them and then they move on to be able to self-regulate themselves i know this is a big topic and we've covered a huge amount um in this episode and i will come back to this skill because i think it's such a powerful one and there are other tools and strategies that i can recommend to help but hopefully there's enough in there that you feel that you can then make that start and as always i encourage you you know repetition is the mother of all learning is go back to pieces of this of this podcast episode re-listen to certain bits focus on one thing that you are going to give your attention and your consistency to you don't need to and i would really highly not recommend that you try and take on too much but is there one piece of what mary hann of you know that i've spoken about that really speaks to you that you can take and say do you know what i'm going to run with that for the next 14 days the next 30 days observe and see what happens when we are consistent that's when we see the most progress and it's often being consistent in what can feel like a really small piece but it's a really pat the consistency is a powerful piece and when we try to do too much we set ourselves up for failure same with our children because it's much more difficult to be consistent when we're chasing multiple goals than when we're focusing on on the one and as ever if you enjoy listening to the podcast and you've enjoyed this episode particularly why not share it with a friend or a colleague or a neighbor because they may well also benefit from hearing the same advice and as always if you have a moment if you've not yet rated or reviewed this podcast then i would be eternally grateful if you could do that so that others can find us and we can spread the love so until next time check engine abs or maintenance light on take the
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