Every now and then you may see an article mentioning the Stanford “marshmallow experiment”. Decades ago, researchers tested a group of young children to see if they could delay gratification. The kids were given a favorite treat and told if they would wait and not eat it for a time, they would be given a second one. If they didn’t wait and ate it immediately, they wouldn’t receive another treat.
The researchers recorded which students ate the treat immediately, which ones called the researcher back early (a third option which meant they got a second treat, but not their favorite) and which kids were able to wait the entire fifteen minutes and receive the second preferred treat.
The study didn’t stop there though. Over the years, the researchers went back to these same students and took various measures of how “successfully” they were navigating various aspects of life. Later in life, the children who had been able to delay gratification were described by others as being more competent, had higher SAT scores and even bran scans at middle age, showed two areas of their brain were more highly developed than those areas in the other subjects.
Did you know that almost everyone in your child’s world – even many Christians – will try to convince your child almost everything in life is a gray area? With the possible exception of murder and a few other crimes, most people today believe in relativism. Everything in life is relative and truth is whatever the person decides is truth.
In