Are American Kids Spoiled? What’s Your Verdict?

Denise Schipani / 14 Comments / discipline, in the news/media, spoiled kids, television / Are American Kids the Most Spoiled? FAO Schwarz, Business Insider, Elizabeth Kolbert, Live from the Couch on CBS-TV, The New Yorker /

Spoiled kids. It’s a big topic — and often a misunderstood one. What do we actually mean by spoiling? 1. Are we saying an unspoiled kid is like a perfect ripe peach, and a spoiled kid is a piece of fruit in which rot has set in? Like, there’s nothing you can do? 2. Is […]

May 19, 2009

The Marshmallow Experiment: Does Your Child Know How to Wait?

Denise Schipani / 7 Comments / discipline, family life / delayed gratification, Jonah Lehrer, marshmallows, patience, The New Yorker /

I read a fascinating article in The New Yorker yesterday. (Which, having read the magazine weekly for years now, is a sentence that pops out of my mouth pretty frequently.) It’s called “Don’t! The Secret of Self Control,” by Jonah Lehrer. The piece opens with a description of an experiment conducted in the late 1960s, […]