Right Start Blog

Waiting Is the Hardest Part: Delayed Gratification in High-Speed Culture

By: Kylie Schappeler
Mrs. Schappeler shares tips for helping our children develop the willpower not to give up what they want MOST for what they want NOW.
Being a teacher and a mom of a five and seven-year old, I am acutely aware that waiting can be tough on a kid. Perhaps nothing highlights this notion more than a 10-hour car trip with children impatient to reach the destination. “How much longer? Are we there yet? When will be there?” Maybe that’s just our family, but I’d venture to guess that you might have experienced something like this with your kids, too.
 
In all honesty, sometimes I don’t even blame my kids for their impatience or lack of willpower. After all, I’m not the world’s most patient person when my Amazon package doesn’t arrive in two days, when the ATM line is a few cars too deep, when I unexpectedly hit one extra red light in town, and don’t even get me started on a long line in a coffee shop. Yet, upon a moment’s reflection, I’m actually pretty appalled at my own impatience. When did I become so hurried that I couldn’t cope with a little delay here and there? What makes it so challenging to self-regulate and delay our impulses? I think it has to do with the lost art of delayed gratification.
 
The concept of delayed gratification has been around since people have had needs and wants, but was made more famous in a 1960’s Stanford University study in which preschool-aged children were offered one marshmallow if eaten right away, or two if they were willing to wait a 15-minute period of time. The study suggested that this ability to self-restrain, even at a young age, has been associated with a range of positive outcomes in adolescence and beyond, including greater academic aptitude, higher SAT scores, healthier weight, and effective coping with stress.
 
To an extent, we can blame our lackluster willpower on our culture. It’s easy to realize that instant gratification is a priority of a culture that prizes high-speed internet, fast food, and express pick-up. Studies have shown that 32 percent of online shoppers will start abandoning a website after a one- to five-second delay. One to five seconds?! It doesn’t seem so long ago that I waited for the ridiculously-slow dial up connection on my family’s PC. Two decades ago, waiting a few minutes to load a page was the norm, not a crisis! Yet today we can barely tolerate a page that doesn’t load within the literal blink of an eye. I can also distinctly remember sitting by my boombox waiting for my favorite songs to come on the radio so that I could record them to my “mix tape.” Conversely, today, when my own kids want to hear any song that has ever been recorded, Siri makes it happen for them in a matter of seconds. I acknowledge that these “heroic examples of patience” are remarkably trivial to generations before me, but perhaps it reveals that our expectations for gratification are largely based on context and culture.
 
I hope my kids, and my students for that matter, become people who have the capacity to be patient and self-disciplined enough to make thoughtful decisions in life. I believe this ability starts with the small everyday decisions and habits they develop. Sometimes they will need to tolerate the discomfort of delayed gratification with a greater ideal in mind. It seems to me that this type of willpower can only be effectively taught and learned through experience: living through the unease of occasionally being denied and delayed, then eventually realizing the satisfying reward of finally achieving that which was pursued.  
 
In order to help students and children strengthen their willpower, adults need to positively model delayed gratification and coach their children to practice self-restraint and effective ways of getting the “must-do’s” in life done. Below are a few practical tips worth considering:
 
1.     Visualize Progress
 
Help a long-range goal become easier to comprehend with a display of incremental progress.  This concept of visualizing progress is already implemented effectively in The Country School. In Kindergarten, for example, Mrs. Godlee and Mrs. Kullman help even the school’s youngest learners understand delayed gratification by rewarding positive behavior with scoops of beads or pom-poms added into a jar as they work toward earning a popcorn or cookie party once the jar is filled. Five- and six-year-olds develop the sense that they are on their way to earning something, even when they haven’t earned a tangible reward yet. The pride and ownership of their progress is contagious!
 
2.    Break a Task into Manageable Steps
 
Often people abandon an end goal because they feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the goal they must accomplish. A good way to deal with this feeling is to break the goal down into manageable pieces, and line them up in a sequence that promotes success. Setting a goal to complete a marathon typically follows the achievement of smaller goals like finishing a 5K, a 10K, or half marathon. Saving for retirement can seem like a daunting task, but saving a small portion of each paycheck seems doable. If completing four subjects in a row of homework is too much for some kids, consider finishing two right after school and the rest after dinner.
 
3.     Teach Kids to Do the Hardest Part First
 
Admittedly, this strategy continues to be my own mantra when approaching some goals, even as an adult. “Just eat the beets and get it over with, Kylie,” my inner voice tells me. I believe it could be advantageous to train our children to do the things they don’t want to do first. It will leave more time for the things they want to do later and make tasks that follow seem more palatable. In our family, this looks like completing homework before getting tech time, eating vegetables first, and showering before movie time.
 
4.     Practice Growing Willpower
 
You cannot effectively delay gratification without the willpower to make it happen, and it is our lack of willpower that sometimes causes us to give up on a task. Fortunately, willpower can be learned. The more delayed gratification one experiences, the more willpower gained. The opportunities to practice are infinite; picking your battles and choosing a few important areas where delayed gratification is needed is a good place to start. Additionally, studies have shown that willpower rises with improved sleeping, healthy eating, exercise, and through prayer and meditation.
 
5.     Teach Self-Directed Speech
 
My husband and I are working on teaching our kids phrases that are easy to repeat and that remind them to control their impulses (with mixed results). For instance, when the girls were younger, if we didn’t want them to beg for endless amounts of TV time, we’d tell them in advance that they’d only get one show, and ask them to repeat the phrase “just one show” before allowing the privilege. When tempted to beg for more, it was often one of our girls, not my husband or I, who reminded the other of the “just one show” agreement. For older children, consider using the expression: “Don’t give up what you want MOST for what you want NOW.” Delaying gratifications can be tough, but giving kids practical reminders can equip them to stay the course.

As my kids and I walk through the Country School’s parking lot most mornings on our way into the building, we often stop to appreciate any new aspects of the construction project taking place. I’m no expert in construction, so there’s an element of magic to me in contemplating how a once-paved lot could become a state-of-the art building in a matter of a year. Though never labeled as such, I believe what we really stop to admire each day is the progress, the incremental changes, and the anticipation of what’s to come. None of us expect this beautiful school to be finished overnight – in fact, we’d all be a little nervous and skeptical if it was – but we trust the process. After all, truly great outcomes usually require significant time and effort, not to mention a healthy amount of patience as you await the end reward.
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