To go or not to go? That was the question.
Rebbetzin Kushner — a world-famous parenting expert — was coming to our city to talk about “Helping our Children Develop Self-Control — the Precursor to all Middos.”
I needed that lecture. But the house looked like a casualty of Katrina, I looked like something the cat dragged in, and the kids were light years away from slumber-land…
I pushed myself out the door.
Rebbetzin Kushner began with the famous longitudinal experiment conducted in Stanford. Six hundred preschool-age children were presented with a choice: enjoy one marshmallow now or wait fifteen minutes and get two. In follow-up studies, the children who’d successfully delayed gratification showed significantly higher SAT scores and parental ratings as twenty-year-olds, among numerous other life measures. Fascinatingly, the outcomes did not correlate with predictable factors like wealth or intelligence.
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