Learning to Take Control Over Your Life
As every parent knows, young children are impulsive. It’s as though they have no way of stopping themselves. They lack self-control. They dash across busy roads, laugh at fat people and shout out in public.
This inability to control thoughts and actions has been one of my research interests for decades now as I am interested by the fact that we have to develop the capacity for self-control as children in order to be clever and successful as adults. Otherwise, we would always be at the mercy of all the different urges and drives that compete for our attention and action. Young children lack adequate ways of stopping their urges, which manifests as impulsive behaviour.
All children go through a phase of impulsivity early in development but by the time they are ready for preschool, they are beginning to demonstrate the capacity to regulate behaviour. They can withhold doing things in order to achieve a greater goal. In medieval Germany, it was thought that, given the choice between an apple or coin, the child who could resist the temptation of the fruit and take the coin was ready for schooling. They were in control of their childish impulses and urges.
In my laboratory, we don’t offer children apples but we do sometimes offer them marshmallows. In what is now a classic set of studies from the late 1960s, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel offered four-year-olds a plate with two marshmallows and told them that they could have one now, but if they waited while he left the room, the child could have both on his return.90 In our lab, to avoid the various ethical problems of using marshmallows, we use a similar test where we ask the child to turn their backs while we wrap a present that they can have if they wait. They are told not to turn around and peek at the present while we leave the room to fetch some tape to finish the wrapping. From behind a one-way mirror in the adjacent room, we record the child’s behaviour and how long they can wait.
Whether it is tempting marshmallows or hidden presents, both of these situations measure what is known as ‘delay of gratification’. This is the amount of time that children can wait before succumbing to temptation – and it turns out to be a very useful predictor of how children perform on other tasks that require self-control. What was most remarkable in Mischel’s original studies was that he found that delay of gratification measured at four years predicted a child’s academic performance and how sociable they were at fourteen years of age.91 When these children were followed up as twenty-seven year-old adults, those who had exhibited better self-control as toddlers were more successful, sociable and less likely to have succumbed to drug taking.92
The reason is simple. If you can regulate and control your impulses, then you are more patient at solving tasks, do not get bored so easily and can resist temptation. When it comes to other people, you are less selfish which makes you more likeable. Very often social interactions result in a conflict of interest between different individuals that must somehow be resolved. These coordinating abilities depend on self-control, and without it we can become antisocial.
Regulating our self is one of the major roles of the prefrontal cortex. These brain regions operate to coordinate competing thoughts and behaviour by inhibiting the excitatory commands arising from different regions. Without the executive control of our frontal lobes, we would be at the mercy of every whim, distraction, impulse, tic or urge that could threaten to sabotage any chance of achieving acceptance by the rest of society or fulfilling the goals we have set for our future self.
That’s why children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are thought to have poor self-control.93 They find it very hard to sit still. They can be disruptive. They cannot concentrate on a task. They are easily distractible. They are more likely to be shunned by other children and find it difficult to make friends. Their hyperactivity and impulsivity can become such a problem that the child becomes uncontrollable. For many decades, such children were labelled naughty and undisciplined. Not surprisingly, ADHD children perform below their classmates on academic tests with many requiring special schooling. Around half of the children diagnosed with ADHD grow out of it during adulthood, but the remainder still experience problems in later life. ADHD emerges in the preschool years and affects around one in twenty children with about three times as many boys as girls.94 Since the disorder was recognized in the 1970s, it has remained controversial. However, twin studies support a strong biological predisposition. If one identical twin has ADHD, then, in around three out of every four cases the other identical twin also has the disorder.
The behaviour of children with ADHD is sometimes described as ‘wired’, as if they are on speed. This is ironic because one of the treatments is to give them Ritalin, a stimulant similar to amphetamine drugs. These drugs increase the activity of neurotransmitters that operate in the frontal lobes, which are thought to increase inhibition and the capacity to concentrate. This is why many university students who have no medical problem that requires them to take Ritalin, nevertheless use it to improve their academic performance. It helps them concentrate. In contrast, alcohol, which is a depressant drug, reduces activity of the frontal lobes and our capacity to inhibit drives, which is why people can become hungry, harmful and horny when they are drunk.
However, there may be another way of controlling your self rather than drugs. Delay of gratification tasks reveal that children who manage to delay are not just sitting there staring at the marshmallow and using willpower to control their urges. In fact, that would be the wrong thing to do. Rather, the children use different strategies to take their mind off the temptation. Very often they distract themselves by singing a song or doing something with their hands to take their mind off the temptation. In fact, coming up with alternatives might be the secret to resisting temptation. You can even train children how to distract themselves or tell them to imagine that the marshmallow is only a picture and not real. All of these strategies reduce the attention-grabbing properties of the goal, thereby making restraint more possible. It also means that self-control is something that can be practised, which explains the counterintuitive finding that children raised in very strict households perform worse on delay of gratification. By being too controlling, parents do not allow children to develop their own internalized self-control,95 which might explain many of the stereotypes of individuals who have led sheltered lives, running amok when they are no longer under the control of others.
But who is this person who is out of control, if not the juvenile self? Who is distracting who? Some colleagues argue that the whole notion of self-control seems to demand that we accept that there is a self in the first place to lose control. Where is the illusion of self here?
One way to think about it is to imagine the self constructed like a spider’s web but without the spider. Each strand represents an influence pulling on the overall structure. The self is the resulting pattern of influences pulling together, trying to find a common ground. These are the thoughts and behaviours that compete for our activity. Some strands are stronger than others and, if they snap, the shape of the web can become distorted. In the same way, our lives are made of different strands holding our self together. The young child without self-control is still constructing his webs of influence and has not yet established ways of offsetting the strong impulses that want to take over. The arrangements of strands are self-organizing by the fact that they are competing. There need not be a self at the centre of the web holding it together.