Hi everyone, this is Angela and I’m going to impersonate Sandy since she’s left the state.  It’s pretty easy for me since I’m Chinese and live in Massachusetts and also have a daughter that says the darnedest things. But I can’t live up to being totally skinny and gorgeous (trust me, I’ve met Sandy in person, and she is way too hard on herself!).

So allow me to let you in on a secret.  If you have a kid that is four years old or later, you can find out his or her destiny in life from a simple experiment with cookies.  Things like being well or badly behaved, to SAT scores, to their BMI index as an adult.  And it has nothing to do with whether the cookies are chocolate chip or raisin (stupid raisins, stay out of my cookie!).  It has to do with willpower.

I heard about this from a special podcast by WNYC’s Radio Lab called Mischel’s Marshmallows.  Radio Lab is a fascinating show that explores science in creative and engaging way.  I would highly recommend it if you are a podcast listener, and you could also catch it on NPR on the weekends.  The gist of this particular podcast talks about an experiment conducted by Walter Mischel in the 1960’s.  He had three daughters from ages two to five, and noticed that around age four, they started to exhibit to ability to delay gratification through willpower.  He then conducted an experiment on 500 preschool kids where he would have one marshmallow or cookie on a table in an isolated room.  He told each child that they could either have one cookie now, or wait and have two cookies later.  Then he left the room and video taped them through a one-way mirror.  As you can imagine, this is pure torture for kids and there are many funny videos on YouTube recreating this experiment.  Some kids caved after a minute, and some kids made it to the end at twenty minutes.  The average was around 7 or 8 minutes.  Five or six years later, many of the kids attended the same school as his daughters, so completely informally, he asked his daughters how these kids were doing.  (more…)