> Think about Japan, where kids are often taught to wait quietly for meals or gifts
Author got the country and items correct but not associated correctly. In Japan, kids pass the marshmallow test with flying colors but fail the same test if it's a gift. In America kids generally pass the gift test (hypothesis is that they're used to waiting for presents on Christmas).
"Another thing I’ve noticed is how much modeling matters. My daughter watches everything I do. If I tell her to wait and then lose my patience two seconds later because the internet is slow, what’s the lesson there?"
As a father of 3 kids, I can confirm 100% this is true. Once you understand that, your life changes completely. You realize there is somebody in this world, who will model their life after yours.
What kind of example you give them is up to you.
Suddenly, "be the change you want to see in the world" gets a whole new meaning !
My mom has this very interesting theory: A parent needs to be by a child's side for the first 6-7 years of their life and devote all their time to it. Which is what she did with me. My dad stepped up for the challenge and provided for both of us. My mom had one goal: to make sure that I'd stay curious. She taught me how to read at the age of 4, signed me up for piano lessons(I haven't played piano at all nearly 3 decades later but I can still read notes), she made sure I'd be interested in different cultures, which subsequently pushed me to learn a few languages(which is the biggest contributor to the fact that I am doing very well for myself by a huge margin, forget software engineering, speaking English was the one thing that truly opened up the gates for me). Which on a slightly lower level did exactly what the article says. For contrast, I was old enough to witness and evaluate the extreme opposite - my mom's brother and his wife, who had children when a dog would have sufficed their needs. Their children were pushed aside, no one ever spent any time with them, whenever they started crying, someone jumped over to the toy store, get a bag of toys and shove them in their face so they would shut up. To such an extent that their rooms were filled with unopened toys and I'm not talking about 1 or 2 in a box, I'm talking dozens if not hundreds of toys still in their boxes. Last time I saw these children, they were >10 years old and they had no clue how to use a fork and a knife.
People wash oranges?! Why? You peel the skin off and discard it. Is the worry that if the skin is dirty then you eat the insides with dirty hands after peeling it?!
I don’t have kids. However, this same concept can be applied, and verified, with dogs.
I have made it a rule to never deceive my dog, and she trusts me because it. If I pick up her water bowl to refill and clean it while she is in the middle of drinking, I make it a point to always give it back with fresh water. I have several water bowls around the house , and the one in my room only gets refilled when I see she is actively drinking from it.
She sees this removal of something she wants (and needs) as a good thing, because I have never deceived her. I always give it back.
If I say we are going for a walk or I grab the leash, we go for a walk. I try to not do things that she would interpret as something not intended. For example, grabbing the leash and not taking her out.
With dogs you become really mindful of your actions. They learn so many of your subtle non-verbal cues, that you start to notice how much your body speaks.
I often think about this, and it has been a valuable learning experience. If I ever decide to have kids, I will make sure that what I communicate (either verbally or non-verbally) is congruent with my actions. I believe that this, is the surest way to build trust.
I'm not sure why the focus on "young" parents. Consistent parenting is very important at any age. Kids need their parents to be reliable and dependable with clear expectations and boundaries or things can get bad very quickly.
Inconsistent and unpredictable parenting is a common factor in children with oppositional defiant disorder and treatment often includes working with the parents as much as working with the child.
I feel like this article is good, on the verge of great, then makes cultural comments that invalidate the point trying to be made for no real reason. Like the race or location of the parent determines their childhood?
The rest is spot on. I became a parent before I was ready, and man, they are little sponges. They learn everything you do, everything you say, embarrassingly so. My 5 year old would lay on the couch to 'rest her back' like me. She'd say weird country sayings I learned from my own Dad, like 'kneehigh to a cricket.' I had a habit of saying 'dicking with' to mean 'messing with' until she got scolded by a teacher at the ripe old age of 7.
The hardest part for parents today seems to be putting their phone down. It's what the kid and Mom have fought about forever, then applied to me. It's so easy to lose yourself in your social media, work, reading, etc. and kids are super receptive to it. But not as that effort, but as having a parent who stares at their phone unattentively. Our kid made her own 'phone' out of cardboard as a child, pretending to read and chat on it. That struck me deeply.
I never had social media, but as a voracious reader still find myself falling into the trap. Kids notice. Kids today have it harder because of that. My parents didn't have the Internet, they created the world we lived in and tailored it to us. I think that's incredibly rare today.
Now she's 13, knows it all, and doesn't want to be picked up anymore. And I tell you, I wish I never had a smartphone at all.
There are no iPad kids in Taiwan. You go to a restaurant and all the toddlers are quietly eating. When the tantrums flare the parents gently put a lid on it. It’s truly remarkable, and I don’t have a good theory for it. But it makes going out for dinner a consistent pleasure.
I don’t know how to raise kids with an even keel but I am certain that putting a nonstop algorithm in their face and becoming outraged when they inevitably become overstimulated is not the way.
This applies to adults, too. When you're really poor, it's actually a reasonable strategy NOT to keep money but spend everything as soon as you hit pay day, for instance on storable food. Why's that ? Because money on your bank account can be seized, because you're late on rent, or because you unexpectedly got fined because your rusty old car has a broken light, etc. Food can't be seized, therefore at least you know you'll eat next week, even if it's only cheap pasta and canned sauce, and Nutella basically lasts forever.
The main challenge that parents face today is on-line culture. Creating trust may mitigate that.
In the same way that teachers cannot educated children instead of their parents, even that they help. Social networks should not educate children but they are doing that. Being the problem that social network incentives are misaligned with education. Ad driven feature development and content promotion plus total deregulation make the on-line world a minefield for children.
If children at least trust their parents it is possible to mitigate the worst parts of on-line culture.
I cannot overstate the importance of this. This particularly affects neurodivergent people. The article also (correctly) mentions how socioeconomic status plays a role here.
Food insecurity erodes psychological safety. Housing insecurity erodes psychological safety. Having to do unpredictable and extra jobs just to make ends meet such that a parent has unpredictable availability hurts psychological safety. Having to break promises because of circumstances hurts psychological safety and this is just way more likely if you're struggling, despite your best intent.
It's worth ruminating on this when you start to understand how every aspect of society is designed to extract value from you at every possible moment. Third and fourth jobs, medical debt forcing you to work, student debt, mortgage debt, high rent prices.
Yet the thirst for ever-increasing profits is unquenchable. Part of the reason that people such as myself rail against this system and the society we've built around work is how damaging it is to society as a whole.
South Korea is really the end stage of this pipeline, where birth rates are around ~0.71 children per woman as there are so many disincentives to have children and, for that child to have a good life, everything gets invested into their education. The pressure is intense such that the teen suicide rate is huge. And this birth rate is so low that 3 generations of this will decrease the population by 90%.
I've had discipline problems for my whole life despite fighting it with different ways, to the point I'm kind of giving in and accepting that it is just who I am.
I have trust in my parents. We have issues between us like all families, but I believe they did their best to raise me without a doubt. At least I didn't have concern about food on the table for a single second during my childhood, and I got most of the toys I wanted. Maybe it is something more minor or deeper.
I am not saying that you shouldn’t build trust with your kids (it’s important and only fair to them … they rely on and usually adore you, you should in turn be kind and reliable to them and love them back).
But: the null hypothesis for anything which correlates childhood behavior, childhood environment and adult behavior should be that everything is 100% genetic. From my glance at the studies, the marshmallow experiment was instead always done with the null hypothesis that kids and their parents are only connected by living in a common household (aka “shared environment” in the sense that it’s shared between siblings).
I would still imagine that some effect of the household on the “delayed gratification” would persist, but it would probably be weaker and I am not sure it would predict much about outcomes as an adult.
I've always taken comfort from the fact that my two boys were different on day zero. This tells me that although I have a great deal of influence on them, it isn't all up to me: it's both nurture and nature. (Takes a bit of the pressure off.)
This is spot on - I came from a very abusive and neglectful home, bordering on torture, and the way it carries into my life into my middle age is funny to look back on when it comes to “scientific” studies like the marshmellow test. In many ways, my early distrustful experiences have led me to become stronger in other ways that make up for my weaknesses. Not everyone is like this, unfortunately, and I very much agree with this message - kids should feel safe for maximum development. Especially kids on the spectrum, where frequently broken promises can possibly be more traumatic than it would otherwise seem.
This post is a perfect reminder of Gandhi’s advice: "Be the change you want to see in the world." We can’t expect kids to trust or wait for better outcomes unless we first model consistency and patience ourselves. Our everyday actions—keeping promises, showing reliability—are the real lessons that shape their future.
What if you live in an unpredictable society where promises are often broken and trust outside of a chosen few should rarely be given?
Rightfully, the article says kids shouldn’t be judged for not waiting if there are factors that said, “hmm, that second marshmallow may be a lie.”
But I’m not sure the story goes far enough in this sentiment: when trust has been broken, waiting for the second marshmallow is the less adaptive response. The waiters are the kids behaving against a likely outcome. To the extent that this might predict later behavior at all then my guess would be that that non-trust marshmallow-eaters might show more determination to go after what they want than non-trust marshmallow-waiters. And the true test would be which kids adapt their waiting choices according to the promises kept/not kept.
But then again sometimes a marshmallow is just a marshmallow.
Parenting is one of the hardest things I will probably ever do in my life. I grew up in a middle-class family in SEA, and when I came to the West, I realized what a fantastic job my parents did raising me.
Here, things are quite different. Many upper-middle-class families struggle to provide stability, proper education, and a loving environment—things we always took for granted growing up. This isn't a denigration of Western society. More like an observation of how capitalism has made both parents work like crazy and still feel like they don’t have enough.
It’s not a panacea in the East. We had to deal with overpopulation. Absurd competition in schools, colleges, and universities scarred my childhood. But I'm thankful to my parents for what they endured for me.
I cannot imagine how different my life would be if I didn't trust both of my parents to the ends of the earth and beyond from the moment of consciousness. I also cannot imagine how different my life would be if despite that, they were untrustworthy people.
Everyone hate hypocrite and little kids especially hate hypocrites. You really need to be consistent with what you tell them and how your own actions. It’s so easy to mess this up so you need to humble yourself and explain that you’re not perfect either.
Building trust is much more than routine, it's about being predictable yourself. It's also about being supportive of the kids when they want to do something yopuu thik is so-so, also about letting them fail (and help them to recover), making them understand why we ask them to do something, giving them clear limits, but more than all, I'd say, being there (don't look your phone when you're with them, spend time with them when they want to, etc.)
And that starts from day zero and last (in my own experience) at least unti 19 years old.
It's fun, not difficult and it allows some spare time (yeah, less time than before you got them, but some time nonetheless) for yourself.
Perhaps a more accurate title would be "Why parents of young children should focus on building trust with their kids". In any case, thanks for the enlightening article.
I get to closely watch my nephew being raised. He is about 2.5 years old now. If his parents need to go somewhere, they do this thing where they slip away while someone distracts the child. Really breaks my heart to see this. I can see the convenience factor. But I noticed that when the child is with them, he very often looks over his shoulders when they go out of his view. The kid is really sweet and deserves respect and honesty.
It's not just kids. I find this works with pets as well: be predictable in delivering their necessities -- food, exercise, play, affection -- and they behave better. Make them beg and they behave worse.
Also, businesses thrive on trust. If a business can predict and prepare for conditions, if it can depend on loans, grants, services, the economy, it can invest and thrive.
My kids got this delayed gratification stuff from the beginning but mostly in the form of. Yes you might get that cookie at the bakery however you have to wait to eat it until after dinner.
I'm much more worried about the general lack of resilience and self-reliance I see in a lot of kids and teens. I think it's caused by a combo of parents and schooling. Also the level of anxiety seems very very high.
Author Oliver Burkeman discusses this marshmallow test in his book Meditations for Mortals.
Paraphrasing from memory -
Who is to say that stockpiling as many marshmallows as you can is inherently more virtuous or objectively more positive than enjoying one marshmallow in the moment you and the marshmallow are ready for each other.
"Now" is the one moment you are truly alive. Rest is a concept.
It's actually possible that tolerance for delayed gratification might have nothing to do with life success. It might be purely coincidential that affluent parents create environments that make delying gratification easier, but the success is transferred to their offspring by much simpler mechanism, inheritance.
The point about trust/predictability is a nice new take on the delay gratification story.
Good points from a motivated new! parent. When you get to your third kid, you tend to lose that burning ambition and think you know it all. We should always be learning.
As a parent, you can't demand trust. It's a gradual process that requires mutual commitment and it will inevitably strengthen your relationship. It will also set your child up to develop healthy relationships in the future.
> A follow-up study showed that kids from stable, reliable homes were much more likely to wait than kids from unpredictable ones. If you’re a kid and the adults in your life constantly break promises, why would you trust them this time? Why wait for the second marshmallow if history tells you it might not show up? Waiting isn’t a character trait; it’s a strategy. And strategies are shaped by experience.
I think this is a potentially dangerous oversimplification of the work discrediting this study. The first sentence is pretty accurate, but the rest of the paragraph puts "stability" 100% in the hands of parents, and not childrens surrounding environment due to poverty. Parents can only do so much if there aren't good schools, safe communities or reliable policing.
I'm probably being a little too critical here, and it's clearly important as a parent to do everything you can to make sure that your child has a stable, trusworth environment, I have a son and that's exactly what I try to do personally.
But I think we also have a massive influence in how we shape society, children in poverty have unpredictable, unstable environments even if they have great parents. There are some really clearly documented outcomes of the effects of poverty, and yet a societal tendency to blame outcomes on parents and character over situation still remains.
I'm basically just saying in a long winded way, be a good parent, but do what you can to make the world a safer and more reliable place for other children too.
When I was a little kid I had a school psychologist give me the marshmallow test. It was extremely awkward because their assumption was the same as used throughout this article, that the marshmallow represented a strongly tempting treat. But it happens that to me as a picky eater marshmallows were always creepy nonfood and to this day I still find them absolutely disgusting. I was also quite disciplined because of my violent and abusive father, so I just sat through it and then gave both of the marshmallows to the first other kid I encountered who said they liked them.
When people go on and on about the marshmallow test what they are really saying is they don't really know anything or even actually care about human nature or experience. The whole thing is garbage.
Nowadays my paying work is servicing properties which means a lot of awkward sharing of people's homes and families. It is absolutely heartbreaking how many kids are being raised like pets or fun game partners. They end up having near zero executive function and have to be helped with everything including the most basic life decisions. What kids need is a sense of agency and some tools for dealing with the world. Enough of these stupid and disconnected marshmallow games. Let's start actually taking kids seriously and giving them what they need to function as adults.
Maybe the experiment was planned better than the video but in the video it's not clear if the children are aware it's an experiment and if they're aware of what an experiment is in general.
Makes logical sense to read about. We give my daughter as much consistency as possible
Family meals, bedtime, we live on a routine...
She's still a tiny terrorist.
I'm not a father (yet), but I thought a lot about this, and I totally agree with everything. It is good to hear it from somebody with actual experience.
One of the most important points about parenting is that kids learn from watching you. That means what you say has far less impact than people colloquially think it does. What matters is whst you do and how that relates to the words you say.
E.g. if you want your kids to value culture, it is way more effective to live in a way that shows you value it, instead of just saying culture is important and never touching it with a ten foot pole yourself. You could never say culture is importsnt and go to the theater and museum every other weekend and that would be way more effective than telling your kid about the importance every day.
The latter doesn't teach the kid that culture is important, it teaches them that there are certain things your parent wants you to be, that they themselves don't manage to do despite them thinking it is important. As a kid your parents are likely the most powerful figure in your lifes, so if they aren't able to do it, how could you?
Any parents needs to have a keen eye out for these implicit lessons they are teaching their kids. The crazy thing is that these implicit lessons can at times be the polar opposite of the lesson you want to teach them.
And it is okay to fail, if they see you are trying to improve yourself, guess what the implicit lesson is? That working on yourself is not only normal, but a good thing that even parents do.
I know this comment invites disaster but.....what is heaven other than the ultimate delayed gratification? i.e. don't worry about your miserable life as a serf toiling for the lord of the manor 6 days a week because if you're good now you'll be happy after you die. You can imagine the aristocracy laughing to themselves about that idea.
Nowadays we get told to save money...but I'm from Zimbabwe where saving money was a total disaster. Instead it was important, when I was still there, to spend it at the earliest possible time on anything physical. The prize for discipline was to be robbed.
... and yet of course if nobody saved money we'd all live an inflationary hell and if some people didn't believe in heaven there might be nothing else to retard their atrocious behaviour.
The marshmallow test does not predict success in life. Success in life predicts the marshmallow test. All the other factors they measure are variants of this. Success of parents, stability of home life, etc., are not random events that happen to a child. They are contributors via a variety of uncontrolled factors that correlate to being successful later in life.
In other words, doing things in your child's life in an attempt to improve their Marshmallow Metric (tm) is useless cargo culting.
The headline makes it sound like a boomer giving advice to a millennial parent or your in-laws giving unsolicited advice. I started hate-reading it but it turned out to be rather wholesome and good. Thank you!
I wonder if it's "inverse" has been studied. Promise the child another one after 15 minutes but then either not deliver on the promise or even steal the one marshmallow.
I know people that had the equivalent happen to them as kids, and I think it had enormous effect on their personality as adults.
Depending how often it happens, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how you raise sociopaths.
Why young parents should focus on building trust with their kids
(desunit.com)540 points by desunit 13 February 2025 | 406 comments
Comments
Author got the country and items correct but not associated correctly. In Japan, kids pass the marshmallow test with flying colors but fail the same test if it's a gift. In America kids generally pass the gift test (hypothesis is that they're used to waiting for presents on Christmas).
source - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-culture-affec...
another source - https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/07/21/new-take-marshmall...
As a father of 3 kids, I can confirm 100% this is true. Once you understand that, your life changes completely. You realize there is somebody in this world, who will model their life after yours. What kind of example you give them is up to you.
Suddenly, "be the change you want to see in the world" gets a whole new meaning !
But what if they just understand time-value-of-marshmallow. Sometimes marshmallow now is better than marshmallow later.
People wash oranges?! Why? You peel the skin off and discard it. Is the worry that if the skin is dirty then you eat the insides with dirty hands after peeling it?!
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43033732
I am confused do people actually like eating marshmallows, if so why?
It always seems to be taken as read that they’re irresistible. Why on Earth
I have made it a rule to never deceive my dog, and she trusts me because it. If I pick up her water bowl to refill and clean it while she is in the middle of drinking, I make it a point to always give it back with fresh water. I have several water bowls around the house , and the one in my room only gets refilled when I see she is actively drinking from it.
She sees this removal of something she wants (and needs) as a good thing, because I have never deceived her. I always give it back.
If I say we are going for a walk or I grab the leash, we go for a walk. I try to not do things that she would interpret as something not intended. For example, grabbing the leash and not taking her out.
With dogs you become really mindful of your actions. They learn so many of your subtle non-verbal cues, that you start to notice how much your body speaks.
I often think about this, and it has been a valuable learning experience. If I ever decide to have kids, I will make sure that what I communicate (either verbally or non-verbally) is congruent with my actions. I believe that this, is the surest way to build trust.
Inconsistent and unpredictable parenting is a common factor in children with oppositional defiant disorder and treatment often includes working with the parents as much as working with the child.
The rest is spot on. I became a parent before I was ready, and man, they are little sponges. They learn everything you do, everything you say, embarrassingly so. My 5 year old would lay on the couch to 'rest her back' like me. She'd say weird country sayings I learned from my own Dad, like 'kneehigh to a cricket.' I had a habit of saying 'dicking with' to mean 'messing with' until she got scolded by a teacher at the ripe old age of 7.
The hardest part for parents today seems to be putting their phone down. It's what the kid and Mom have fought about forever, then applied to me. It's so easy to lose yourself in your social media, work, reading, etc. and kids are super receptive to it. But not as that effort, but as having a parent who stares at their phone unattentively. Our kid made her own 'phone' out of cardboard as a child, pretending to read and chat on it. That struck me deeply.
I never had social media, but as a voracious reader still find myself falling into the trap. Kids notice. Kids today have it harder because of that. My parents didn't have the Internet, they created the world we lived in and tailored it to us. I think that's incredibly rare today.
Now she's 13, knows it all, and doesn't want to be picked up anymore. And I tell you, I wish I never had a smartphone at all.
I don’t know how to raise kids with an even keel but I am certain that putting a nonstop algorithm in their face and becoming outraged when they inevitably become overstimulated is not the way.
In the same way that teachers cannot educated children instead of their parents, even that they help. Social networks should not educate children but they are doing that. Being the problem that social network incentives are misaligned with education. Ad driven feature development and content promotion plus total deregulation make the on-line world a minefield for children.
If children at least trust their parents it is possible to mitigate the worst parts of on-line culture.
I cannot overstate the importance of this. This particularly affects neurodivergent people. The article also (correctly) mentions how socioeconomic status plays a role here.
Food insecurity erodes psychological safety. Housing insecurity erodes psychological safety. Having to do unpredictable and extra jobs just to make ends meet such that a parent has unpredictable availability hurts psychological safety. Having to break promises because of circumstances hurts psychological safety and this is just way more likely if you're struggling, despite your best intent.
It's worth ruminating on this when you start to understand how every aspect of society is designed to extract value from you at every possible moment. Third and fourth jobs, medical debt forcing you to work, student debt, mortgage debt, high rent prices.
Yet the thirst for ever-increasing profits is unquenchable. Part of the reason that people such as myself rail against this system and the society we've built around work is how damaging it is to society as a whole.
South Korea is really the end stage of this pipeline, where birth rates are around ~0.71 children per woman as there are so many disincentives to have children and, for that child to have a good life, everything gets invested into their education. The pressure is intense such that the teen suicide rate is huge. And this birth rate is so low that 3 generations of this will decrease the population by 90%.
I've had discipline problems for my whole life despite fighting it with different ways, to the point I'm kind of giving in and accepting that it is just who I am.
I have trust in my parents. We have issues between us like all families, but I believe they did their best to raise me without a doubt. At least I didn't have concern about food on the table for a single second during my childhood, and I got most of the toys I wanted. Maybe it is something more minor or deeper.
But: the null hypothesis for anything which correlates childhood behavior, childhood environment and adult behavior should be that everything is 100% genetic. From my glance at the studies, the marshmallow experiment was instead always done with the null hypothesis that kids and their parents are only connected by living in a common household (aka “shared environment” in the sense that it’s shared between siblings).
I would still imagine that some effect of the household on the “delayed gratification” would persist, but it would probably be weaker and I am not sure it would predict much about outcomes as an adult.
Rightfully, the article says kids shouldn’t be judged for not waiting if there are factors that said, “hmm, that second marshmallow may be a lie.”
But I’m not sure the story goes far enough in this sentiment: when trust has been broken, waiting for the second marshmallow is the less adaptive response. The waiters are the kids behaving against a likely outcome. To the extent that this might predict later behavior at all then my guess would be that that non-trust marshmallow-eaters might show more determination to go after what they want than non-trust marshmallow-waiters. And the true test would be which kids adapt their waiting choices according to the promises kept/not kept.
But then again sometimes a marshmallow is just a marshmallow.
Here, things are quite different. Many upper-middle-class families struggle to provide stability, proper education, and a loving environment—things we always took for granted growing up. This isn't a denigration of Western society. More like an observation of how capitalism has made both parents work like crazy and still feel like they don’t have enough.
It’s not a panacea in the East. We had to deal with overpopulation. Absurd competition in schools, colleges, and universities scarred my childhood. But I'm thankful to my parents for what they endured for me.
The study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726811...
Other articles:
- https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/new-study-disavows-marshmal...
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-research-marsh...
And that starts from day zero and last (in my own experience) at least unti 19 years old.
It's fun, not difficult and it allows some spare time (yeah, less time than before you got them, but some time nonetheless) for yourself.
Also, businesses thrive on trust. If a business can predict and prepare for conditions, if it can depend on loans, grants, services, the economy, it can invest and thrive.
There's a lesson for our current moment in there.
I'm much more worried about the general lack of resilience and self-reliance I see in a lot of kids and teens. I think it's caused by a combo of parents and schooling. Also the level of anxiety seems very very high.
For kids on ADHD spectrum - absolutely. Marshmallow test is flawed, because it doesn't filter for the lack of control over executive function.
> A follow-up study showed that kids from stable, reliable homes were much more likely to wait than kids from unpredictable ones.
Unstable home is strongly correlated with impaired lack of control over executive function.
Paraphrasing from memory -
Who is to say that stockpiling as many marshmallows as you can is inherently more virtuous or objectively more positive than enjoying one marshmallow in the moment you and the marshmallow are ready for each other.
"Now" is the one moment you are truly alive. Rest is a concept.
Good points from a motivated new! parent. When you get to your third kid, you tend to lose that burning ambition and think you know it all. We should always be learning.
I think this is a potentially dangerous oversimplification of the work discrediting this study. The first sentence is pretty accurate, but the rest of the paragraph puts "stability" 100% in the hands of parents, and not childrens surrounding environment due to poverty. Parents can only do so much if there aren't good schools, safe communities or reliable policing.
I'm probably being a little too critical here, and it's clearly important as a parent to do everything you can to make sure that your child has a stable, trusworth environment, I have a son and that's exactly what I try to do personally.
But I think we also have a massive influence in how we shape society, children in poverty have unpredictable, unstable environments even if they have great parents. There are some really clearly documented outcomes of the effects of poverty, and yet a societal tendency to blame outcomes on parents and character over situation still remains.
I'm basically just saying in a long winded way, be a good parent, but do what you can to make the world a safer and more reliable place for other children too.
When people go on and on about the marshmallow test what they are really saying is they don't really know anything or even actually care about human nature or experience. The whole thing is garbage.
Nowadays my paying work is servicing properties which means a lot of awkward sharing of people's homes and families. It is absolutely heartbreaking how many kids are being raised like pets or fun game partners. They end up having near zero executive function and have to be helped with everything including the most basic life decisions. What kids need is a sense of agency and some tools for dealing with the world. Enough of these stupid and disconnected marshmallow games. Let's start actually taking kids seriously and giving them what they need to function as adults.
E.g. if you want your kids to value culture, it is way more effective to live in a way that shows you value it, instead of just saying culture is important and never touching it with a ten foot pole yourself. You could never say culture is importsnt and go to the theater and museum every other weekend and that would be way more effective than telling your kid about the importance every day.
The latter doesn't teach the kid that culture is important, it teaches them that there are certain things your parent wants you to be, that they themselves don't manage to do despite them thinking it is important. As a kid your parents are likely the most powerful figure in your lifes, so if they aren't able to do it, how could you?
Any parents needs to have a keen eye out for these implicit lessons they are teaching their kids. The crazy thing is that these implicit lessons can at times be the polar opposite of the lesson you want to teach them.
And it is okay to fail, if they see you are trying to improve yourself, guess what the implicit lesson is? That working on yourself is not only normal, but a good thing that even parents do.
Nowadays we get told to save money...but I'm from Zimbabwe where saving money was a total disaster. Instead it was important, when I was still there, to spend it at the earliest possible time on anything physical. The prize for discipline was to be robbed.
... and yet of course if nobody saved money we'd all live an inflationary hell and if some people didn't believe in heaven there might be nothing else to retard their atrocious behaviour.
The marshmallow test does not predict success in life. Success in life predicts the marshmallow test. All the other factors they measure are variants of this. Success of parents, stability of home life, etc., are not random events that happen to a child. They are contributors via a variety of uncontrolled factors that correlate to being successful later in life.
In other words, doing things in your child's life in an attempt to improve their Marshmallow Metric (tm) is useless cargo culting.
What could be better than compiling the compiler with the little ones? There is no trust without rust.
I wonder if it's "inverse" has been studied. Promise the child another one after 15 minutes but then either not deliver on the promise or even steal the one marshmallow.
I know people that had the equivalent happen to them as kids, and I think it had enormous effect on their personality as adults.
Depending how often it happens, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how you raise sociopaths.
This is a common sense idea... the fact that this required this level thought is scary.