ABQJOURNAL HEALTH: Waiting teaches vital life lessons

Monday, June 22, 2009

Waiting teaches vital life lessons

By Lance Chilton
For the Journal
          Q: How can you possibly combine marshmallows and a Dvorák serenade in one column?
        A: I have recently read a very important article on marshmallows. No, it doesn't deal with the demise of the cast marshmallow in favor of the extruded one, an undoubtedly cost-saving measure taken by the struggling marshmallow industry in the past century that dismayed my marshmallow-loving wife. The article, by Jonah Lehrer in the May 18 New Yorker, is titled "Don't!" which is what my wife attempted to tell fickle marshmallow makers way back in the 20th century.
        "Don't!" refers to a child and marshmallow experiment done by Walter Mischel, a Stanford psychologist, in the 1960s. Children were given the choice of eating one marshmallow as soon as the adult left the room, or holding off and waiting until he returned and then getting two marshmallows. Only about 30 percent of the children could wait the few minutes the psychologist was gone (watching the child through the one-way glass). Mischel conceived of the experiment as a way of measuring a child's ability to delay a small immediate gratification for a larger, but later reward.
        Mischel didn't stop there — he followed the lives of his subjects into adulthood. It may not surprise you to hear that the successful waiting group, those more able to delay immediate gratification, were more successful in their education and in their occupations than the others, but it may surprise you to hear that this ability to wait for a later reward was at least as important as intelligence in predicting educational and occupational outcomes.
        Lack of ability to wait for a later reward — to look only at immediate pleasure — may help to explain the outcomes of another study just published by Judith Breslau and others regarding children followed from an early age in the Detroit area. They found that children with attention difficulties at 6 years of age were much less likely to have success as high school students. Distractible children are notoriously unable to delay gratification, so it would not surprise Walter Mischel that they had done much worse during high school, and were at higher risk for delinquency and occupational mishaps.
        I thought of the marshmallow experiment as I sat at the wonderful Church of Beethoven recently, listening to a very talented group of young musicians play the Czech composer Antonin Dvorák's lovely "Serenade for Winds." Ten young people playing horns, clarinets, oboes, bassoons and a double bassoon and an equally talented cellist and double bass player enchanted an overflow "congregation" with the blissful work, resulting in a prolonged standing ovation from everyone there. Maybe the "standing O" was the equivalent of two marshmallows for the young people who had given up play and television time in their youth to practice their instruments and learn the structure and rhythm of music.
        Oliver Sacks, a New York neurologist and essayist, gives considerable evidence in his remarkable book, "Musicophilia," that the human brain is programmed to appreciate music. The musical wiring is better in some than in others, and in a few goes haywire — the patients Sacks has seen with seizures brought on by music or who have music playing in their heads all the time, for example, all fortunately rarer than the number with perfect pitch.
        In the context of the marshmallow experiment, however, music might just be one of those things that teach children the virtues of waiting for that second treat. I know that I never got to that point, laying down my mini-violin to the despair of my parents and the joy of my beleaguered teacher. I also know that those I heard in that wonderful concert had gotten there. They had practiced, practiced, practiced.
        Art and music are severely limited in the schools now in the name of test scores or time for the three R's. That may be counterproductive. Perhaps children who learn through the arts that there are rewards worth waiting for are the ones who will learn more and be able to have more satisfying careers.
        Help your children stick to these and other tasks that lead to later and better results in the long run, to keep sawing away on that violin until it sounds less like a saw and more like a lark. Help other Albuquerque children taste the joy of music by donating old instruments through classicalkhfm.com. They may be able to read, rite, and 'rithmetic better, and may achieve a fourth R, rhapsody.
        Lance Chilton, M.D., is a pediatrician at the Young Children's Health Center in Albuquerque, associated with the University of New Mexico. He is happy to take questions at 272-9242 or lancekathy@yahoo.com.

You also can send comments via our comment form