The Marshmellow Test

According to Peg Streep on this Marshmellow test:

"While the researchers don’t talk about attachment in their article—they talk about unreliability — I think all of this makes terrific sense. As I’ve already written in an earlier blog post —“Daughters of Unloving Mothers: 7 Common Wounds”—attachment theory explains a great deal about human behavior, and perhaps the ability to exert self-control is yet another area where what we learn at the beginning affects both our abilities and mindsets. To a small child, an emotionally unreliable or inconsistent or cruel parent doesn’t just demonstrate her or his nature, but the nature of the world and relationships.  If you’re used to broken promises, it makes sense that you’d eat that marshmallow pronto.

So, for the seventy percent of you who have trouble resisting the temptation of the marshmallow, it may not just be about self-control after all. You may have to understand how the past, your past, still motivates your behavior. To resist the marshmallow, rewrite your own script."

Streep would have you believe that the behaviors of small children and the resistance to the marshmellow, or lack thereof, is just due to the "attachment style" a child has with his/her parent - usually indicating the mother.

While parent-child relationships certainly have a place for how children learn self-control, discipline,  and other "character traits" there is a much more basic answer than diving into attachment theory and overly complicating a child's behavior with a marshmellow and diving into a psychoanalytic explanation. It is widely known, at least within the neuroscience community, that there are two separate neural systems that involve reward. One that involves short-term gratification and the other long-term delay in the reception of monetary rewards. The study states:

"More generally, our present results converge with those of a series of recent imaging studies that have examined the role of limbic structures in valuation and decision making (26, 43, 44) and interactions between prefrontal cortex and limbic mechanisms in a variety of behavioral contexts, ranging from economic and moral decision making to more visceral responses, such as pain and disgust (45–48). Collectively, these studies suggest that human behavior is often governed by a competition between lower level, automatic processes that may reflect evolutionary adaptations to particular environments, and the more recently evolved, uniquely human capacity for abstract, domain-general reasoning and future planning. Within the domain of intertemporal choice, the idiosyncrasies of human preferences seem to reflect a competition between the impetuous limbic grasshopper and the provident prefrontal ant within each of us." 

 What this says is really quite basic with respect to the Marshmellow test. Children's brains simply aren't developed enough and the younger you are, the harder the struggle with the Marshmellow (I exclude cases of abused children and their fear of their parents, simply because abuse affects developemnt in other ways - if an abusive father presented the same marshmellow test to his abused child, the results will certainly be different).

Similar studies have also been done with teenagers - because the brain doesn't fully reach maturity until 25-28 - and drugs (tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, etc. etc.).

While I don't want to diminish the significance of the parent-child relationship, there are some things that must be fundamentally understood about the way we act and our brain development. 

Update 10/23: More here