My 45th birthday is coming up next month. These days, I don’t quite look forward to birthdays like I used to—it just means feeling another year older. But that wasn’t always the case.
When I was a kid, I remember having a countdown in my head until my March birthday that started at the beginning of February. We used to have my birthday parties at the local roller rink, and what I anticipated the most, of course, was the presents. What kid doesn’t love seeing that pile of gifts in the corner of the room that you are finally allowed to open at the end of the night?
I was just as excited for Christmas, for all the same reasons. One Christmas Eve, I even stayed up literally all night in anticipation of seeing those presents under the tree. My poor parents.
As a mom of two myself now, I love watching my kids anticipate these and other exciting events in their lives. But what I don’t love is their seeming inability to wait for some of these events.
They don’t have a choice for things like Christmas or their birthdays that are tied to a specific date, but waiting for me to make dinner, waiting to go to their favorite bookstore, or waiting just a few minutes while I search for their favorite shirt often comes with a lot of whining and complaining. “Wait your turn,” for a game, or waiting in line for ice cream is even more difficult and often leads to crying.
It’s enough to make you want to skip all the fun and just stay home. How can we help kids to be more patient and wait to get something they want?
It turns out that my kids aren’t the only ones who are really bad at the waiting game. In a classic psychology experiment called the marshmallow task, researchers have tested children’s ability to wait by offering them a snack, specifically a marshmallow—a snack that almost any kid (or adult) would want. The children are told that the experimenter needs to leave the room for a while, but if the child can wait until the experimenter returns, they could have two marshmallows instead of just one.
Alternatively, if the child can’t wait, they can ring a bell, and the experimenter would promptly come back. But, if the child decides to ring the bell, they would only be able to eat one marshmallow instead of receiving two. If you’ve been around kids often enough, you can probably guess that this is really hard for them, and the overwhelming majority of preschool-aged children ring the bell (Mischel & Ebbesen, 1970).
This confirms what many parents have observed at home: that kids have a hard time waiting to get something good. What’s interesting though, is that cross-cultural research suggests that this isn’t true of children everywhere in the world.
In one study, researchers compared the behavior of children in Germany—who are similar culturally to kids in the U.S.—to children from an indigenous tribe called the Nso in the Northwestern region of Cameroon. Like the U.S. children tested in the original study, German children had a really hard time waiting for the second marshmallow and needed to use strategies to distract themselves, like sitting on their hands, talking to themselves, or not looking directly at the marshmallow.
In contrast, for the Nso children, this task was as easy as marshmallow pie. Over 70 percent of these kids could wait till the very end; in fact, some of them even fell asleep while waiting!
The researchers speculated that because children in the Nso culture are expected to control their emotions at a very early age, even the youngest Nso children were able to wait patiently for their treat (Lamm et al., 2018). This suggests that children can be taught to be more patient and wait, given the right environment and background.
On top of that, there is newer research showing that the waiting game might be situationally specific, and that U.S. kids may not fare so badly in all contexts. In this study, preschool-aged children in Japan and the US were given the standard marshmallow task described above, as well as a second similar task that involved waiting to open a wrapped present. Not surprisingly, the U.S. kids had a hard time waiting in the version of the task that involved the marshmallow, and like the Nso children, the Japanese kids did not.
But the results flipped for the wrapped gift. In this task, the Japanese kids were the ones who couldn’t wait, while the U.S. kids had no trouble at all (Yanaoka et al., 2022).
Why is this the case? These findings seem to reflect the cultural norms of each country: In Japan, children are often expected to wait to eat until everyone is served, even in their classrooms for lunch every day—a norm that is not as common in the U.S. In contrast, children in the U.S. tend to have lots of experience waiting to open wrapped gifts, for example, by waiting until Christmas day to open presents that are visible under the tree or waiting until the end of a party to open a pile of wrapped presents on display. Children in Japan, in contrast, are often given one or two gifts sporadically throughout the year instead of having specific events where they have to wait to receive a large number of wrapped presents.
The moral of the story here is that yes, kids have trouble waiting, but only in contexts where they’re not used to having to wait. If they’re used to waiting—like we are used to waiting for Christmas morning, or to opening all of our presents at the end of a birthday party—they can totally do it.
So if you want your kids to wait, just make it something that is part of your everyday routine. It might be difficult at first, but like everything else, your kids is likely to get used to it—even if you have to wait a little while for it to happen.