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Self-Control In Kids Predicts Future Success
SpuriousLogic writes "A new study suggests that a child's future success depends on the amount of self-control they exhibit. From the article: 'The international team of researchers looked at 1,037 children in New Zealand born in the early 1970s, observing their levels of self-control at ages 3 and 5. At ages 5, 7, 9 and 11, the team used parent, teacher and the children's own feedback to measure such factors as impulsive aggression, hyperactivity, lack of persistence and inattention. At age 32, they used physical exams, blood tests, records searches and personal interviews of 96% of the original participants to determine how healthy, wealthy and law-abiding the subjects had turned out to be. The results were startling. In the fifth of children with the least self-control, 27% had multiple health problems. Compare that with the fifth of kids with the most self-control — at just 11%. Among the bottom fifth, 32% had an annual income below approximately $15,000, while only 10% of the top fifth fell into that low-income bracket. Just 26% of the top-fifth's offspring were raised in single-parent homes, compared with 58% of those in the bottom fifth. And 43% of the bottom fifth had been convicted of a crime, far outstripping the top fifth's 13% rate.'"
Self control? What's that?
"Among the bottom fifth, 32% had an annual income below approximately $15,000, while only 10% of the top fifth fell into that low-income bracket. Just 26% of the top-fifth's offspring were raised in single-parent homes, compared with 58% of those in the bottom fifth."
Well, that may very well be the problem right there. Ditto for the fact that kids with low self control probably came from low-income families, too.
That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits. I'm half convinced it cures ADHD, too, from my personal experience.
Self control in kids will eventually lead to self control as adults? This can predict future success ... as in success in staying out of prison.
And you know what? That kid in elementary school that was the first to try smoking? He works in a Walmart now.
Those with enough self control to not eat badly all the time and to exercise regularly are healthier. Those with enough self control to apply themselves to their schoolwork before playing are more successful. I would never have guessed.
Then that chef Ramsey dude wouldn't be richer then dirt. /fail
http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html
I've heard a similar small test before. I remember it goes like this: give the kids a candy each, then tell them if they can keep it for another hour, they get to get a second one. I am sure I would keep it, since I don't like candies.
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/09/08/13/1644229/Joachim-De-Posada-Talks-About-Delayed-Gratification
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Aha - beat me to it. This vid is cute as shit and pretty interesting - further supporting the theory in OP
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html/
In this short talk from TED U, Joachim de Posada shares a landmark experiment on delayed gratification -- and how it can predict future success. With priceless video of kids trying their hardest not to eat the marshmallow.
Or maybe character matters?
vi +
I take it that a "good" metabolism is a fast metabolism, according to this study? A fast metabolism is not good to have in a famine. It's only "good" to have in our current environment of plentiful food. It would make sense that if you don't have enough self control to stockpile some food reserves (or something that can be traded for food) in preparation for such a time, your body had better do it for you by making you a lazy fatass.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
The same is true for adults, or, if you may, human beings. Big surprise, I don't know why people insist on treating children as retards or something.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
The researchers had a very strong temptation to find another 300 children to study, but being successful scientists were able to exhibit self-control.
Could someone take a sec and explain to me how this system works? I submitted this earlier today:
http://slashdot.org/submission/1455260/EPA-Broken-CFL-Bulb-Better-read-this#comments
Now it's nowhere to be seen on the "recent" page. It just seems to have evaporated.
To make matters worse, I can't see anywhere in the FAQ where this is explained.
- aj
I can't comment on the study because I couldn't find a link to it in the linked article (wtf?).
One of the definitions of intelligence is the ability to put off an immediate reward for a long term benefit. Children are presented with a jelly bean and told "if you can wait until [the researcher] get back, you'll get 3 jelly beans", and then the researcher leaves.
Kids who can put off temptation the longest tend to score highest in IQ tests.
For example, smokers could give up smoking for 3 months and use the money to pay for a high-def TV. This never happens in practice, because of their inability to put off the immediate pleasure in order to get the long-term reward.
BTW, the links on Slashdot have no underlines? With no decoration, you have to mouse around the text in order to see if a link was included in the article.
That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits.
So does "doing" musical instruments.
Any sport, for that matter.
And any activity that requires concentration and diligence.
I've studied martial arts for quite a few years and taught a little too. The benefits are no better than the above and actually playing sports that use a ball will give a kid "ball sense" - the ability to predict where it's going from looking at it.
Studying music will also give the kid the same mental preperation and more dextarity than martial arts. Martial arts will not make one better at other sports than if one didn't do them.
As far as combat skills: I worked with "jocks" who came off the street with no previous martial arts experience and beat black-belts.
The skills from martial arts are overrated and there's nothing like after several years of practice to walk into your orthopedist and finding him shopping for an airplane while you're hobbling over to his desk. And then there's the dentist for your TMJ.
I don't care how good you become (I was .very good, others will land hits on you.
Amina Khan, the linked article's author, seems to have lifted those correlation numbers from the study. Suggesting the study didn't deal with causation is itself fallacious unless you've read the study and found the same problem. It's really unsurprising that a journalist reports statistics poorly, but saying the study itself is bad because of that is just cynically wrong.
Am I the only one thinking that all they are saying is that the animal Homo Sapien Sapien is easier to domesticarte if you do it early? Surely this is the case with most species?
Huh? Whut? The number of traits is irrelevant when correlating two specific traits. The only argument you can make is that there isn't a causal relationship. 1,000 is MORE than enough to show correlation, especially when the variations between groups is so high.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Note the dates, kids from the 1970s, at kids age 3-11 measured success when the kids were 32. I.E. Math says the study ended in 2000.
No, your fate is NOT predestined by the time you are 11.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The "causation is not correlation" refrain doesn't really apply here. The article claims that self-control predicts success, not that it causes it. The study seems pretty solid, and it's conclusion is believable. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to determine whether self-control leads to success versus "unknown factor X" leading to both self-control and success. To do that would require you to take a large sample of children, and teach self-control to some who don't have it, while also breaking the self-control of some of those who do. Not the sort of study a parent will sign their kid up for.
The point is that self-control is good, and trying to instill it in a child is likely (but not guaranteed) to help them in life.
Also, I think you're misunderstanding the summary. It's not saying that the kids with poor self-control had low income or single-parent homes growing up, it's saying that kids with poor self-control are likely to grow into adults with low income and broken homes. The fact that lack of self-control can lead to divorce should surprise no one.
Please beat your children.
I don't get why so many people on Slashdot like to harp on this. How exactly do you expect them to prove causation in a sociological study? Correlation is all they can show, and correlation can be interesting. And since they used the word "predicts" instead of "leads to", they can't even be accused of conflating the two.
I can't read *any* of the responses to my post for some reason, but I can see the 1st line and so can get a feel for what's being said.
Intelligence is not well defined, both in common usage and in the fields of psychology and (my field) AI. I agree that there are more aspects which contribute to an overall sense of intelligence.
One of the failings of AI in my mind is the lack of a good definition of intelligence.
As a mathematician, I know what a manifold is, can tell whether something is one, and can construct one to use as an example.
As an AI researcher... nada. There is no consensus in the field as to what intelligence actually *is*. The closest we have is the Turing test, which is not a definition and conflates intelligence with "human intelligence" and "communication".
(So for my own researches I first had to come up with a workable definition, which makes me an outlier in the field.)
Thanks for the PNAS link. I'll read it once more bugs have been squashed in the comment system.
The only argument you can make is that there isn't a causal relationship.
Or that the sampling wasn't properly randomized.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Link to the paper "A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety" by Terrie E. Moffitt, Et Al.
The Abstract : http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108
The PDF Paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108.full.pdf+html
The Journal Snippit: http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/highlights.shtml#control
Though policy-makers have considered programs to enhance the nation’s health, wealth, and safety through interventions to improve children’s self-control skills, researchers had not previously shown that childhood self-control actually influences adult outcomes in large populations. Terrie Moffitt et al. analyzed assessments of more than 1,000 participants in the Dunedin, New Zealand Longitudinal Study who were followed from birth to age 32. Even after accounting for differences in social status and IQ, the researchers found that children as young as 3 who scored highly on measures of self-control were less likely than lower-scoring children to develop common physical health problems, abuse drugs, experience financial difficulties, raise a child in a single-parent household, or be convicted of a crime as adults. In a second sample of 500 nonidentical British twins, the sibling who scored lowest in measures of self-control at age 5 was more likely than the other twin to begin smoking, perform poorly in school, and engage in antisocial behaviors at age 12, the authors report. Children whose self-control improved during the study fared better as adults in measures of health, wealth, and criminal history than was otherwise predicted by their initial childhood scores. The results suggest that even small improvements in individuals’ self-control could improve the health, wealth, and safety of large populations, according to the authors. — J.M.
The results were startling.
Unless you have even the most basic knowledge of the subject. In which case it's additional verification of previous studies. What's next slashdot, amazed gasps about this new thing called fire. And how it's apparently baffling scientists?
Everything will be taken away from you.
Here is an interview about this in particular (not sure if available outside NZ!): http://www.radiolive.co.nz/Children-with-more-self-control-turn-into-healthier-and-wealthier-adults/tabid/506/articleID/18253/Default.aspx or google http://www.google.com/search?q=Dunedin+Longitudinal+Study for background information.
It is a very rigourous study that has been going for nearly 40 years (now on phase 38), producing 900 papers, and a superb data set because they still have an amazing 96% of the original sample set (now aged about 40) getting regularly tested. They go to extreme lengths to continue keeping the original people coming back - e.g. organising flights for all the people that have elsewhere including a large number that are spread around the world.
Happy moony
It means you're less likely to end up in prison. Hard to be successful (using any meaningful definition of the term) while locked up behind bars.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Lack of self control certainly does not prevent success:
List could continue for a very long time.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Some years ago there was a book entitled "Emotional Intelligence" which reached a
conclusion that ability to decide to delay gratification was instrumental to a person's
success in later life.
None of this is new.
But it's a slow news day so Slashdot editors ( who wouldn't last a month in the real world
of publishing ) act like this is newsworthy.
A professor at Stanford did a less rigorous version of this study using marshmallows and bells in the 1960s: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer
You can't measure 'law-abiding'. All you can do is measure 'not getting caught' and assume.
I can't even guess at how many years I'd be facing, yet I've never been arrested.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If you believe "The Bell Curve", which I do, IQ selects for all of the positive attributes listed in the article. What's the correlation between IQ and self-control? And why is it ignored?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
It's a lot easier to chant "correlation doesn't mean causation" than actually think critically.
They harp on it, because it helps them to believe that they are superior. Other fun phrases are "liberty", "liberal", "personal freedom", "freedom of speech", and "libertarian". There are obviously more.
They don't know how to interpret data.
testing out my trending skills
That 43% seems a bit low to me. How do the other people without self-control manage to avoid doing wrong things? How do they manage to avoid the law?
testing out my trending skills
Funny thing I just found my VHS tape of the movie Once Were Warriors. Co starring Temuera Derek Morrison.(He has become one of the New Zealands most famous stars for his roles as the abusive Jake "the Muss" Heke in 1994's Once Were Warriors and as bounty hunter Jango Fett and the Clone Troopers in the Star Wars series. He also voiced Boba Fett in the 2004 special edition of Star Wars episodes V and VI.) Whats the relevance? Wonder if the New Zealand families the study referred to included ones like Jake "the Muss" Heke family in 1994's "Once Were Warriors", a drama of terrible domestic violence. Once Were Warriors (film) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Once Were Warriors is a 1994 film based on New Zealand author Alan Duff's bestselling 1990 first novel. The film tells the story of an urban Maori family, the Hekes, and their problems with poverty, alcoholism and domestic violence, mostly brought on by family patriarch Jake. It was directed by Lee Tamahori, and stars Rena Owen and Temuera Morrison. Sounds like a convenient way to blame everything on poor people. They are dumb, criminals and are either a baby's Momma or a baby's Daddy. Arrest those idiots gosh darn it!
True.
I would also like to note that finding the reply to your message through the message center is a real pain in the arse. I am glad we got a slightly better looking CSS, but I fail to see how this broke the message center link...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I didn't know there were even 1037 people in New Zealand!
Well I'm fucked then.
How strong an explanatory variable is "self control"?
How is "self control" measured?
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
That my parents divorced. Wish I had used more self control....
I've seen something along these lines at least a year and a half ago. http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations..." -Winston Churchill
You expect any of us here on Slashdot to believe that?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
More like: Intelligent people/kids have more self control than others. and NOT: People/kids with more self control are more intelligent.
While I too got this kind of a lesson, I found it to have one unfortunate side effect. While it teaches you not to misbehave, it also plants an unhealthy fear of authority in you. I came to realize a man should not fear authority, less he spend his life as a pawn. Authority should have a healthy fear of the man.
Those are rather shocking statistics. Amongst the bottom 20%, 43% had been convicted of a crime (8.6% of the group); of the top 20%, 13% had been convicted of a crime (2.6%). So, ignoring the other 60%, that's 11.2% who have committed a crime. I guess prisons must be quite busy in New Zealand!
The USA is the country that has the highest percentage of its own population in jail: 715 per 100,000. New Zealand is in 55th place with 160 per 100,000. Find your country here.
I'm 32, and i query the assumption that at this age i'm a fully functioning adult.
Be a law abiding citizen and take it up the arse from The Man and you'll live longer
Nearly the same top 10% of those who fell in to the "low income bracket" also fell in to the top 11% with health issues. Are they the same people? Where is my Venn diagram ?
I don't think this says anything other than
1. Those who are more wealthy have less health problems 2. Those with less self control are more likely to break the law
Or possibly from this we should conclude that being ill makes you poor and grumpy?
Mod parent up. Intelligence or even self-worth is not to be defined as "That which differentiates me from those assholes in high school", no matter how personally gratifying.
Emotions! In your brain!
That 43% seems a bit low to me. How do the other people without self-control manage to avoid doing wrong things? How do they manage to avoid the law?
Not every action resulting from a lack of self control is criminal. Most people are not psychopathic killers, their urges only held in by tight self control.
People with a lack of self control are most likely to do things like take excess sick days off work for no good (business) reason, regularly get drunker than they should or call their boss a cunt, not engage in acts of armed robbery.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
And so another slashdot reader entirely ignorant of statistics decides to speak.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Huh? Whut? The number of traits is irrelevant when correlating two specific traits. The only argument you can make is that there isn't a causal relationship. 1,000 is MORE than enough to show correlation, especially when the variations between groups is so high.
You can't prove causation anyway for most real world events, no matter how big the sample size.
If you test a million smokers and 999,999 die of lung cancer that doesn't actually prove that smoking causes lung cancer, it "only" makes the correlation very high.
There will always be examples of people who drink a bottle or two of vodka a day and live to be a hundred, and keen runners and cyclists who drop dead at twenty: nevertheless most people would agree you're probably going to be healthier and live longer by reasonable exercising and not drinking to excess.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
surely when a child is better able to sit still etc, it isn't self control its obedience
Obedience is a necessary trait for social success, so it amounts to the same thing.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
elevator is a lift and french fries are chips, right?
I'd like to do the same test, only when I come back I'll take the jelly bean away and tell them I lied. Logically the smart kids will be the ones who didn't blindly trust authority, so I assume they will do better on IQ tests.
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible -W.B.
See the Time Paradox by Philip Zimbardo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJybVxUiy2U
http://www.thetimeparadox.com/
First posters are probably present-hedonistic oriented, as opposed to past-positive, past-negative, present-fatalistic, future or future/transcendent.
Philip Zimbardo talks about a similar study he did with kids and marshmallows they could eat now or get two instead if they waited ten minutes. Kids who were willing to wait did better in general in life in our society. Of course, one may ask, were they happier overall? Zimbardo suggests each culture may have an optimum mix of time perspectives, like perhaps for our culture, guessing, he suggests an exact figure somewhere, about 20% past positive, 30% present hedonistic, and 50% future oriented.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'm wondering what constitute a crime in NZ ? the article would hint at something like 30% of adults at age 32 would have done some sort of crime... .... WTF ????
Since most crimes are not starte before 15, and people have a tendency to calm down after 51 we could gessimate a total crime rate of something like 60% during the full life
And NZ puts relativelly few people in jail so it would seem that in the US they would need an higher crime rate to fill up the jails, something like what ? 90%...
Scary ...
How is it the pot calling the kettle black? I wasn't singling anybody out. I was pointing out that many phrases are overused.
testing out my trending skills
13% crime rate for the best group? 56% for the worst?
On the average one in three?
I must lead a sheltered life. Unless they are counting people with speeding tickets.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
heck half the kids in the U.S. cant even keep pants from falling around their butt...how much self control are we talking. I assume as long as the control also relate to focus and attention then this would be true.
Joe Investor
I am sorry to say, but I expect that further study of this will find that self control is largely a genetic effect rather than something parents or teachers have a lot of ability to change.
Readers who want to dig into this might read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris
And this paper about where having more self control came from.
http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf
Of course the way medical technology is progressing I expect self control to be available in a bottle. :-)
Keith Henson
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain