Impulse Control

I am very proud of the impulse control that my eldest son displayed this morning. He is currently 5 years old and this is totally out of character for him, so I was ecstatic to see this behaviour! After his swimming lesson he is allowed to have one sweet. This he had straight after his lesson before he got changed. After his brother finished his lesson he got his own sweet, and the member of staff offered my eldest another one. He said "no thank you, I have already had one". She allowed him another one and I praised him for his honesty and told him how proud I was of his behaviour.

According to John Medina in his book "Brain Rules for Baby" impulse control is crucial for academic success. He states "children who could delay gratification for 15 minutes scored 210 points higher on their SATs than children who lasted one minute. To quote Wikipedia: "Mischel pioneered work illuminating the ability to delay gratification and to exert self-control in the face of strong situational pressures and emotionally “hot” temptations. His studies with preschoolers in the late 1960s, often referred to as "the marshmallow experiment", examined the processes and mental mechanisms that enable a young child to forego immediate gratification and to wait instead for a larger desired but delayed reward. Continuing research with these original participants has examined how preschool delay of gratification ability links to development over the life course, and may predict a variety of important outcomes (e.g., SAT scores, social and cognitive competence, educational attainment, and drug use), and can have significant protective effects against a variety of potential vulnerabilities.^[2] (Mischel et al., 1989; Mischel & Ayduk, 2004)".

Medina goes on to explain that this is because "Executive function relies on a child's ability to filter out distracting (in this case tempting) thoughts, which is critical in environments that are over saturated with sensory stimuli and myriad on-demand choices... Once the brain has chosen relevant stimuli from a noisy pile of irrelevant choices, executive function allows the brain to stay on task and say no to unproductive distractions." In "Brain Rules for Baby" he outlines what his happening in the brain. If you are interested I heartily recommend you read the book. He also states "A child's brain can be trained to enhance self control and other aspects of executive function. But genes are undoubtedly involved. There seems to be an innate schedule of development, which explains why the cookie experiment shows a difference in scores between kindergartners and sixth graders. Some kids display the behaviours earlier, some later. Some struggle with it their entire lives. It's one more way every brain is wired differently. But children who are able to filter out distractions, the data show, do far better in school".