There's a school of thought that we do our children a disservice if we don't teach them to wait for things.
Citing the famous Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, Michael Grose (an Australian leading parent educator, parent coach, writer and speaker on parenting and family matters) suggested in one of his blog posts that it's important, "to encourage your children to delay gratification, practise self-discipline and build character along the way."
The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment was conducted by a psychologist called Walter Mischel in the late 1960s. Pre-schoolers were given a marshmallow and told they could have it, but if they waited 20 minutes they could have both the first marshmallow, and a second marshmallow. About two-thirds of the kids either ate the first marshmallow straight away, or tried to resist, but gave in within the 20 minutes. The remaining third waited the full time and got their two marshmallows. Many years later Mischel followed up his subjects, who were then in high school, and discovered, among other things, that the children from the first group had experienced more behavioural problems at school and home, had attained lower SAT scores than the second group and had struggled more with friendships.
Mischel's conclusion based on hours of observations was that the delayed gratification kids possessed coping techniques to use with their 'hot emotion' (i.e the desire for the marshmallow) such as distracting themselves from the object of desire, which they then applied to other stressful situations in their lives.
However, in the interesting article in The New Yorker magazine about this topic, Mischel acknowledges that the challenge is to turn some of those tricks into habits.
“This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says. “Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?”
So let's just say that's what we've been doing here at beforeourtime.com. We've been encouraging you to wait...
and wait...
...for us to start posting again.
And now we're very pleased to announce that we intend to make the waiting worthwhile.
Not only have we given the blog a bit of a makeover, we also have an interesting and thought-provoking line-up of posts to come. There will be:
- Our usual erudite and informative posts examining aspects of life pre-1970 and ascertaining their relevance (or not!) to our 21st Century lives
- 'Wisdom on Wednesday' - wise words from the past
- 'Tips from the Archives' (every Sunday) - hints and tips for everything from stain removal, pest control and food storage to etiquette, relationships and time management
- Plus posts examining the changes in corporate life since 1970...for better or worse?
For those of you visiting Before Our Time for the first time - welcome! Please, browse through some of our past posts.
So, are you pleased we made you wait?
