April 11, 2025 • 45 mins
Is self-control something you're born with—or something you can teach your kids, starting today? Psychologist and bestselling author Ethan Kross takes us into the science of the inner voice, revealing how our thoughts shape our behaviour—and how we can shape our thoughts. From powerful tools that help children talk to themselves like a friend to simple mindset shifts that build long-term resilience, this conversation is packed with practical wisdom for raising emotionally intelligent, self-regulated kids.
KEY POINTS:
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Self-control is a skill that can be taught and strengthened.
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The inner voice is a powerful tool in navigating emotions and decision-making.
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Kids benefit from learning how to create psychological distance during challenges.
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Techniques like mental time travel and third-person self-talk are effective at all ages.
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Parents have a unique opportunity to guide how children learn to speak to themselves.
QUOTE OF THE EPISODE:
“We’re not born with self-control; we learn it. And the tools we use to manage our mind are like muscles—we can train them.”
KEY INSIGHTS FOR PARENTS:
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Help your child shift perspective by asking, “What would you say to a friend?”
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Build emotional resilience by teaching kids to recall times they’ve overcome obstacles.
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Model calm and constructive self-talk in your own moments of stress—kids are watching.
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Introduce the idea of an “inner coach” who can guide them through tough situations.
RESOURCES MENTIONED:
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Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross
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Techniques such as self-distancing, visualisation, and reflective self-talk
ACTION STEPS FOR PARENTS:
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Be intentional with your own self-talk—your children are learning from you.
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Use playful, imaginative language to teach kids how to create emotional
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
This is the Happy Families podcast. Hello, my name is
doctor Justin Coulson. It's so good of you to join
me for today's conversation. This is one that I've been
so excited about for a long long time. Today's guest
has been linked to one of the most famous psychological
experiments ever done. Certainly in the last several decades, this
(00:26):
has become an absolute classic. I'll tell you more about
it in just a sec, but let me introduce my guest.
Doctor Ethan Cross is a professor in the psychology department
at the well look, I'll just say, at the prestigious
Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Ethan
specializes in the study of self control, and he was
(00:46):
mentored in graduate school by Walter Mitchell, who famously studied
delayed gratification with what's become known as the marsh Mellow experiment.
Ethan runs the University of Michigan Emotion and Self Control Laboratory,
and he's won a number of awards over the course
of his career, as well as being featured in publications
including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The
(01:09):
New Yorker, and USA Today. And I began by asking
Ethan about his work and his family life.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Well, so, I run a lab called the University of
Michigan Emotion and Self Control Laboratory, And basically, we do
lots of experiments to try to figure out how self
control works in children and adults. And when I use
the term self control, I mean how can people align
(01:38):
their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with their goals? So it's
really broad. It's really like, if you want to act,
or think or feel a particular way in this world,
how can you do that? What are the psychological tools
that allow you to fulfill those goals? And so that
takes us down a lot of exciting paths that I'm
sure we'll talk about today. And when I'm not working
(01:59):
in a lab with my students and colleagues, I'm both
working and relaxing at home. They have a lot of
work at home too. I've got I'm married to a
woman named Lara, and I've got two daughters, May and Danny,
age eleven and six, who are a lot of fun
and the inspiration for lots of self control experiments.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yeah, I bet do you ever experiment on them? Have
you done the marshmallow experiment with your two daughters.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I have, in fact, a funny story about the marshmallow
experiment with my oldest daughter Maya. So my advisor in
graduate school is actually the marshmallow Man, Walter Michelle.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Now before you tell me about Maya for people who
are not familiar with Walter Michelle and the marshmallow experiment,
because that was going to be my next question. Anyway, Okay,
when I Cyber was talking, I was like, no way.
Ethan Cross was supervised by one of the one of
the modern legends of psychology. He did this marshmallow experiment
that so many people have heard of and even have
(03:00):
seen an a recent resurg and solve it on TikTok
in the last few months through the isolation stage. What
did he do? And then what did you do with
Maya as a result of that?
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Sure, So the marshmallow test, in a nutshell is it's
a paradigm for studying self control in the lab under
control conditions. And what you do is you bring a
kid into the lab and then you give them a choice.
You say you can have one treat now or and
we call it the marshmallow test, but in fact we
use whatever treats the kids like so for some kids
(03:34):
it's raisins, other kids it's pretzels.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
And you show me one child that's going to pick
a raisin over a marshmallow.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Really, there are some we could talk about the question
marks that's surround their match. Or I'm just joking. Some
kids like fruit go figure. So you give them a
choice one marshmallow now or if you wait until I
come back. I have to leave the room for a
little bit. But if you can just sit tight and wait,
then you can have two mars. But the only way
(04:01):
you can have two is if you wait until I
come back. And the experimenter doesn't tell the child how
long it's going to take for them to come back.
So there's uncertainty, which we know everyone who's living through
COVID nineteen right now. Uncertainty can drive emotional responses. And
so this for children is a really difficult choice, right
(04:21):
because all the kids, like Walter and the experimenters are
running these studies. They make sure that everyone wants the
two marshmallows.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
And then normally only around age four, maybe five or
six at the monster. So it's not like self regulation
and self control, which is what we're talking about and
teaching these two kids, It's not like this is intrinsic
to them. At this point. Self control is hard. They
go from zero to one hundred emotionally in seconds, don't they?
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Some kids do and other kids don't. And so that's
part of that's one of the really interesting findings surrounding
this line of work. So you look at so everyone
wants the two marshmallows, but they have this dilemma looking
at this delectable treat, right, they're drooling over it, So
what do they do? So it turns out in one
line of studies they find that the kids who were
(05:09):
able to wait longer, their delay of gratification ability predicts
lots of important life outcomes later on in life, so
how well they do in school, how adjusted they are,
and their relationships and their health. And the idea is
that what this task is tapping into is this basic competency,
this ability to manage our emotions. The other thing that
(05:32):
this line of research tells us, though, is what Walter
did lots of experiments to figure out, well, how can
you direct kids to think differently about the about what
they're waiting for the two marshmallows versus one? What are
the different psychological tricks that you can use, so to speak,
to manage your emotions effectively. And so they did lots
(05:52):
of experiments and found developed lots of insights that informed us,
now many decades later, about what are the tools that
people possess that we can use to control ourselves. So
that's the marshmallow test in a nutshell, and the quick
to bring it back to my family, the fun anecdote is, I,
of course have been waiting like a decade since I
(06:12):
started working with Walter, to have a kid who I
could do this task with. And so I dutifully set
up the task and all the parameters and make sure
I'm doing it by the book, and then give I
sit my down and I describe it and I say okay,
and before I leave, she goes, Daddy, I want one
marshmallow now and I want both later. And so it's
(06:35):
a clear violation of a protocol. And so because I
know Walter or I passed away recently but I knew him,
I picked up the phone and I called Walter and
I said, Walter, you know, have you ever heard of
a child doing this? And all the years that you've
been doing this research And he pauses, and very sternly
he says, Ethan, it's not too soon to start therapy
(06:59):
as an indicator of what the of course was joking,
but the message was delivered well.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
And so you're going to have a long, long, hard
life with the negotiator. That's what That's what he's really saying.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Get ready, buckle in that basically that's right. So and
you know, we maybe we'll get into it later. Maya
has proven to be quite adept at negotiations in the
six years since we've done that task.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
So now, now, before I asked the next question, I
think it's really important to highlight that as a as
a parenting expert or as a psychology researcher, my suggestion
is you probably wouldn't be encouraging parents to do the
marshmallow test at home with their children as a diagnostics
tool to determine how self controlled they'll be throughout their life.
(07:44):
Their destiny is not in their decision around.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Marshmallow, absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
I mean, it's a fun experiment.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
It's fun experiment, and you know the way that the
context in which I used it with my kids was
to introduce them to a scientific experiment and then to
talk about what we've learned. And one of the things
that we've learned, which often gets lost in the translation
of this work when when people talk about it with
the world, is that one of the things we know
(08:13):
is that you can change your self control. You know,
one of my pet peeves is when I hear people
saying you have no self control. That's absolutely not true.
Everyone possesses self control to some extent. Some of us
are better at exerting it in some context as opposed
to others. I may be really good at exerting self
control regulating myself when I'm working on a problem at work,
but maybe I have a little bit more difficulties when
(08:35):
I'm coaching soccer. That's not true. I'm pretty good there too.
But I have my I have my weaknesses. They're associated
with the with the pantry post ten pm at night,
when I crave some foods. We all have our Achilles
heel when it comes to self control. But what we
know is that there are different tools we can use
to improve our self control. And these these these different
(08:58):
things we can do, they're teachable, they're strategies are often
easy to implement, and so I talk to my kids
about the different ways that they can manage the temptation
when it exists, and so absolutely not. You wouldn't want
people to think that scores on that test for their
destiny by any means.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Yeah, and I've done at home with my kids as well,
purely to have the conversation about self control and how
it works. In fact, you've taken me exactly to where
I wanted to go next, and that was just to
talk about how we can teach our children's self control.
And what I'm especially interested in is how does it
affect children who are not developing along the typical pathways.
(09:35):
You know, kids that have got ADHD, kids that have
got autism. What can your self control research teach us
in terms of helping those more narrow, rigid thinking children
to manage themselves.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Well, one disclaimer is we haven't looked at several of
those populations, and there's always this tension between wanting to
generalize from the studies we've done as far as we
can and without having looked at ADHD and autism in particular,
it's hard to make that leap because we're dealing with,
(10:10):
in some cases, very different kinds of populations with their
own unique characteristics. Now, what we do know. We can
say something though about about populations of children who experience
difficulty regulating themselves in general, so not clinical populations, but
groups that are just more impulsive, more prone to anger,
(10:30):
more prone to experiencing temptation. By and large, what we
see is that the more intense the emotional response, the
more effective the different self controls tend to be. So,
and the idea there is, look, if you're dealing with
a little bit of emotion, there's not a whole lot
of room for these tools to help you feel better
(10:51):
or help you rein it in. But as the amplitude
of the emotions go up, the more intense it is,
the more room there is to help bring you down.
And so in some of those that man affects studies,
for example, we've seen that the kids who benefit the
most from that technique are the ones who have the
most difficulty regulating themselves in general, they're the ones who
(11:13):
are benefiting. And so there are lots of open questions
about whether that'll extend to autistic and other populations, but
we do have some inklings that it might. So there
are a boatload of different strategies that people can use
to exert self control both children and adults, and to
be concrete about what I mean by that. We know,
(11:34):
for example, that when people are tempted to act in
particular ways, or when they're trying to control their emotions,
diverting their attention can be really powerful right as a
short term fix. So you might want to have a
person if something is bothering us or tempting us, let's
focus on something else. And for young children in particular,
diverting attention can be a powerful tool if they're looking
(11:57):
at a treat. For example, in the marshmallow studies, one
of the best ways to get kids to wait longer
was to put a little box on top of the
marshmallow so the kids couldn't see it, or to have
the child think about other things, think fun thoughts about
being on the playground with mommy pushing me on the swing.
So diverting our attention away from a thing that's tempting
(12:19):
or bothering us can be one kind of tool. Another
kind of tool deals with the ability of the mind
to change the way we think about things. So we
did a study several years ago. It was a brain
imaging experiment in which we were trying to look at
how people can reduce craving responses to things like pizza
or drugs. Right, we see these temptations, we desperately want them.
(12:44):
And so in one condition, we've had people just look
it up an image of a delicious looking piece of pizza,
and in another condition we had them imagine that a
cockerroach had just crawled across the pizzas. And so that's
just an exam of the power of the mind to
transform the way we think about things, and how we
(13:06):
change the way we think can change the way we feel.
That is the basis of cognitive therapy and cognitive interventions
to change our mood.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
So, in a nutshell, what we want to do without
our children is we want to either divert their attention
so they're not even thinking about it, or make it invisible,
like literally pick it up and move it, or pick
your child up and move your child. And this will
obviously work a lot easier with younger children, but you
can still make stuff invisible. They usually look at your
own wing and say, oh, I can't believe you're taking
that away, But technically that's not self control, that's parent control. Nevertheless,
(13:37):
it will reduce the challenge that you're facing.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Well, I think the way you're describing it right is
the parent is being the agent of control, right right,
This parent control. But what we also can do, and
one of the things we're exploring now is teaching kids
to do this on their own. And so one of
the strike if you look back at some of those
early marshmallow studies, what you see is that some kids
spontaneously do this. Some kids closed there. You can't see
(14:01):
me now, your listeners can't see me, but I'm mimicking
what they do. Some kids put their hand over their eyes.
One girl had really long hair and she flipped it
so she couldn't see the marshmallow in front of her.
Another kid told himself a story, an elaborate story with
imaginary friends. And so these are all different tools that
(14:22):
kids are doing on their own. And so as parents,
we possess the ability to essentially give kids the tools
by distracting them or prompting them to think different.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Hey, that person's bothering you at the schoolyard. But let's
look at the big picture, Maya or Danny. You know what,
they've lots of friends. You don't have to talk with
that person. So we could shift their perspective. But what
we can also do is we can teach children to
do this on their own.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
If you would rattal off, let's say three self control tips,
the top three that come to mind for children who
was somewhere around four, five, six, seven years of age,
you know, those elementary schools, those early primary school years.
What kind of tips would you give parents if they
want to help their kids to develop the self control
to not eat the marshmallow or the pretzel or the raisin.
(15:09):
Right where did they go?
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Well? I think one is attention. So teaching them how
to divert their attention away from whatever's tempting them and
give themselves something to focus on is even more powerful.
So really get them to focus in on something that's
equally engaging, but not the thing that's tempting them. So,
if you don't want them to watch TV, give them
a really fun buzzle to work on or something like that,
(15:33):
or problem to work on. Another thing is changing the
way they think about something. So if they're looking at
the candy and they really want to eat it, ask
them to imagine, well, you know, imagine that. I guess
kids aren't tempted by bread. What is it candy basically
mostly right, I mean, imagine that someone stepped on it,
(15:53):
you know, or those kinds of transformations can be powerful, right,
So don't think about it as a marshmallow. Think about
it as a puffy cloud, right, So play with it
in your head, and importantly when you play with it,
don't think about the things that are most Oh my god,
I'm going to think about how it's going to taste.
If you've talked to your child about the negative health
(16:15):
implications of eating too much candy, or negative health implications
for a child like tummy aches, right, not feeling good after,
have them think about that, so, you know, think about
the fact that too many marshmallows can make you not
so healthy, and that's not a good thing. You have
to go to the doctor, and so forth and so on.
A third strategy you can use to give you the
(16:36):
last one is you can try something called what we've
called the Batman effect. So have a child pretend find
their favorite superhero. And as so, superheroes are usually generally
really good at at exercising restraint, right, and being able
(16:57):
to do good things in the world. And so in
some studies, what a colleague of mind Stephanie Carlson has
found is that having children imagine they're superhero, use their name,
Imagine you're Batman, and say what would Batman do right now?
Would Batman be able to not eat the marshmallow? Or
Dora the Explorer? What would Dora do? That can be
(17:18):
really powerful transports them into this other role which gives
them some distance from the temptation and also this superpower
to restrain it. And so that's been a fun strategy
that kids have been able to benefit from in some experiments.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
I love the Batman effect, and what I really love
about that piece of research is, well, first of all,
we're looking at how people who speak to themselves in
that sort of alter ego way, you know, what would
Batman do? What would Wonder Woman do? What would the
bill to do? Versus come on, Ethan, you've got this
(17:54):
versus I know what I would do? You know, these
three different conditions, And you found in this study that
kids person longer. They just they had more motivation, They
had a greater level of self control and tenacity. So
I've been talking to adults about that and saying, when
you're up against something where you don't want to exert
the kind of control that's necessary, or where you're struggling,
or you don't want to persevere, or you're ready to
(18:15):
explode at your children and you just need to regulate
your emotions. Don't necessarily think about what Batman would do,
but think about who your inner mental mentor might be.
You know, think of Ethan Cross or many people, unfortunately
for me, will say that, I just think about what
you would do if you or what I would do
if you were watching me. I know that ancient and
(18:35):
modern traditions have encouraged that. So there's the Christian tradition
of wearing the WWJD bracelet what would Jesus do? And
I think that. I mean, that's a kind of a
self control strategy, really, isn't It's a psychological or self
distancing strategy.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Absolutely. You know this idea of distance. Really what it
boils down to is that it's almost like giving yourself
a time out in the moment. So it's a stability.
When we experienced strong emotions, they often narrow our attention
in on exactly what it is that's driving those responses,
and that zooming in can make it really difficult to
(19:13):
take the broader picture into account. If I am too
intolerant with my children, how might that affect them long term?
So this ability to just hit stop for a moment
and zoom out can be really powerful, and there's lots
of research which shows that. And in fact, this is
a project that where we've been working on for the
past five years. It's called the Toolbox Project. For the
(19:36):
past ten years or so, I've been teaching a class
here may a little bit less than ten years called
the Science of Self Control to University Michigan undergrads, And
it's essentially science's great as hits when it comes to
what we've learned over the past fifty years about how
to control our emotions, our thoughts, our behaviors. And it's
always a really fun class to teach. The students love
(19:56):
the material, they're engaged. And the way it works is
every week students come in, they read stuff and I
pepper them with questions, and then the final day we
reverse the roles. They come in with questions. For me,
it's their last day. Here's what's on my mind. Now
that I've gone through the whole literature, I've digested it
(20:16):
and so forth. And about five years ago, this one
girl named ariel. She raised her hand like really defiantly
as soon as the class started to wanting to be
called on, and so I called on her, and she says,
why are we learning about this now? I go, well,
what do you mean? She goes, well, you know, we've
(20:37):
gone over all of these different strategies that exist, dozens
of strategies that can help us be happier, healthier, get
better jobs, and so forth. Why did anyone teach us
about this earlier on in life when it could have
helped us, like when we were kids or adolescents. And
so the first thing I said was, fear not, life
is not over. You will still have opportunities to use
(20:59):
these strategies once you leave college. But then I did
something I don't want to say it was, it was
slightly cowardly. I did what many politicians do when they
don't have a good answer to a question. I deflected
and I threw it back to the class and I said, well,
what do other people think? Why why haven't you learned
about this yet? And the reason I did that was
(21:19):
because I didn't have a good answer to that question.
And so it got me thinking a lot about why
aren't we teaching kids about what we know about how
the mind works when it comes to self control. We
teach children about how the digestive system works. We teach
them about geometry, we teach them about social studies. These
(21:41):
are just concepts. These are these are topics that we
think are important, and so they're in the they're in
the kind of canon of what we expose them to
in school. Well, the mind seems kind of important and
we've learned about it, so why aren't we also teaching
them about this? And so fast forward five years. What
we've been doing is a group of scientists like myself
(22:05):
have paired up with educational experts curriculum designers to essentially
take the science of self control, what do we know
about the different tools that exist, and we've translated that
into a curriculum for middle and high school kids, so
a little bit older than the ages that you were
asking about. But the idea was that this was a
(22:27):
good place to start, and so we took the science,
which can be filled with complicated terms that scientists love
to use, but we've made it simple and with engaging exercises.
And what we're doing now is we are looking at, well,
what are the implications of teaching children about these strategies.
In some of our early studies we know we have
(22:48):
dated to show that the kids who go through this curriculum,
they do in fact learn the material right. So you
do a test at the beginning and at the end
of the curriculum their knowledge of the science of so
control increases. And what we're getting ready to do with
about ten thousand students next year is we're going to
test to see what effect does learning about these strategies
(23:10):
have on these students' ability to regulate themselves down the
road in life. And the hypothesis the prediction is that
knowing about these strategies should provide these kids with resources
that they could draw upon when they need them, in
the same way that knowing how to compute a percentage
(23:32):
allows us to determine the tip when we go to
a restaurant. The idea is that when a kid is
angry or tempted, if they're motivated to control those urges
or emotions, they should have a knowledge base to fall
back on in those instances.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Earlier, you defined self control. I'd like to now define
emotional regulation. But I'm not sure that there's got to
be an enormous difference in what you said previously. You know,
that idea of harnessing your your faculties and characteristics and
directing them towards a goal effectively was my summary of
your your definition. Would you would you be switching that
up at all for emotional regulation?
Speaker 2 (24:17):
You know? I don't. And a disclaimer, you know for
all of all the people listening, is that scientists are
really good at coming up with different terms that differ
in ever so slight ways, and that could be useful
when we do experiments. But I think the self includes emotions,
(24:37):
it includes behaviors, and includes thoughts and cognitions, and so
when you're talking about controlling the self, self control, to me,
it's a whole kitten kaboodle. So I use the broadest
definition of self control. It's aligning thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
with goals. Now, now that doesn't mean that self control
is always a good thing, because it means that if
(24:59):
you have of bad goals right, the better you are at.
Self control means that you can do bad things right.
So for example, let's say I have the goal of
of of of of committing a crime right, which might
be very challenging for me to emotionally, it might be
hard to hurt someone else. If I have good self control,
(25:22):
that might help me do that. So so self control
in my world is not always good, right.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
And our kids aren't necessarily planning on committing the any
any grievous and we hope not.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
No, that's right, And so in all of our studies,
we're giving them goals that are healthy goals. Of course,
I think that's in most of cases. That's where self
control is being hardness towards.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
I'm fascinated though, by this idea that self control can
sometimes be a bad thing, and it's not necessarily just
in pursuit of negative goals. Sometimes that self control can
also become counterproductive when our children become so rigid and
so focused, and we as adults as well, we become
so focused on something that is good and worthy and useful,
(26:07):
but it's actually going to come at such an extraordinary cost,
and our life gets out of balance. You know, there's
all this Angela Duckworth, who I know you've worked with
her work around being gritty and persevering through tough times.
Paul Tough wrote a book called How Children Succeed. It
was all about teaching kids grit, making sure that they
do the hard yards. And there's obviously a very strong
(26:29):
argument for having that gritty determination and perseverance, having the
self controlled, but there's also a pretty strong argument about
having the wisdom to know when to step back and
just let go. Can you talk a little bit about
why self control isn't always the most important thing, or
isn't always going to be functional and optimal for our
children or for ourselves.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
So many things are interesting about what you said. I mean,
this idea of wisdom is stepping back, right, There is
another illustration of the value of distance, disability to step
back and tick, take stock of what you're going through
and then decide how to behave I think your question
speaks to this issue of that human beings are complicated.
(27:10):
We are not driven to achieve one goal. We live
in a world filled with multiple goals, right, so goals
to succeed at work but also to succeed in our
personal lives. And those goals don't always conflict. As many
people know who are trudging away at work at eight
pm when they might want to be home with their family,
and so there are trade offs that we are constantly
(27:32):
trying to maintain it take stock of and balance and
so forth, and it gets complicated. So, you know, although
most of our experiments focus on one goal, that's not
the world in which we live. And I think people
who are better able to balance all of the different
goals that are on their plates and manage them accordingly
(27:57):
are more likely to be in a position to be
living the kind of life they ultimately want.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Who are these perfect people? Where are they? How do
we study them?
Speaker 2 (28:06):
They're in Australia, of course, of course, So I think
this is you know, this is unfortunately where a lot
of the science stops right now, because most of the
work we do and thus far has been studying specific
goals under tightly controlled conditions. And the reason for that
is it's much harder conceptually and practically to do experiments
(28:30):
when there are seventeen goals that are all conflicting. So
I wish I could tell you who these people are.
There are likely exemplars that we could find and then
try to study in the same way that we Sometimes,
you know, one approach to science is finding people who
are really good at something, you know, the Michael Jordans
of their industries, and then trying to figure out what
(28:51):
makes them tick and then you run experiments on them.
But to my in my mind, we haven't yet done
that on the exemplars of self control.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I think that it's a really interesting conversation though, and
I know we're kind of going off script a little
bit here, but to me, this idea that some parents
will take a conversation about self control and say, Okay,
well I want my child to get into this university
course or have this opportunity in life, or just you've
got to learn self control. Because the dun Eden study
(29:21):
showed the children who learn self control do better at school,
and they're less likely ended up in prison, and they're
going to have more successful marriages. You know, this was
this thirty plus year study of how self control is
associated with all these positive outcomes. So we've got to
teach your self control and all of a sudden life
becomes too controlled. Whether it's pursuing academics or whether it's
(29:43):
pursuing the extracurricular things like piano or ballet or whatever
that thing is that our children are doing outside, you know,
becoming an Olympian swimmer, whatever it might be.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Well, I think a big part of that equation has
to do with number one, what you as a parent
and the child the value right because our goals right, Like,
so what are the goals that we have and which
are most important to us? There are going to be
people out there who, for them, the most important thing
(30:17):
is getting into that desired college or getting that job.
And if that's the case, you can make an argument
that helping that child fulfill that goal is really important.
But let's say people have multiple goals like that are important.
I'm not just getting into the best school, but also
having great relationships and enjoying the moment. Well, that would
(30:39):
suggests a different course of action. I mean, look, I
study this stuff. I'm a presumed expert on this topic,
and I'd be lying if I told you that my
wife and I are constantly doing a kind of of
self and family evaluation of our kids, their goals, our goals,
and how we can give them the best possibility of
(31:03):
living a happy life. Like we want them to be
successful more than that, we want them to be happy.
And you know, I think we are stumbling our way
through like many parents with forward progress. Of course, if
we invite my and Danny on the podcast, they might
say something different. The first step is being mindful of this.
(31:24):
Simply being aware that life isn't driven much of the
time by one goal, but by many is an important
insight that can be useful for helping parents think about
how they want to structure their kids' activities and lives
given these multiple goals that they may have for their
kids and that their kids may have for themselves.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Ethan, I appreciate the vulnerability and you, I guess confessing
outing up to the fact that you're kind of making
it up as you go along, even if you've got
the professorship in psychology, because I feel the same way.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
You know.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
I've written six books, I've got the PhD in positive psychology,
I've run a bajillion seminars on this stuff, and there
are days where I look at my wife and say,
I don't have a clue how we're supposed to manage it.
You tell me, and she'll look at me and as hell,
you're the expert you told me. I'm like, I don't know. Anyway,
let's move towards a conclusion. There's a couple of other
(32:20):
questions that I want to ask you before we get
to my five questions that always wrap up every podcast.
Something that strikes me as vitally important is that emotions
are contagious. Kids catch their parents cranky, they catch our chaos,
they catch our crazy, but they also catch how calm.
The same strategies that we've discussed for younger children, I'm
(32:42):
sure that they work for adults as well for parents.
But I'm curious if there's anything else that you would
add here. How else can parents stay calm and appropriately regulated?
What strategies would you share for parents who are just
over it some afternoons or evenings or mornings.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
I tell you about the strategies that some of the ones,
some of my favorites that I rely on. Because there's
a boltload of strategies there at least a dozen two
dozen out there that have science behind it. We don't
have time to get into them all, but let me
tell you what I do. One thing I do is
I will rely on that linguistic distancing. So when I'm
in the heat of the moment, I'm anxious or I'm angry,
(33:20):
I will use my name silently to think about what
I'm going through.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Ethan's ed, why are you talking to yourself in the
first person? What's going on here?
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Yeah? Yeah, definitely you definitely want to do that silently.
That's an important caveat, and that's helpful. Another thing I'll
do is something that we call temporal distancing jargon. Again,
think of it as mental time travel. This can be
a very powerful tool. I'll imagine about how am I
going to feel about this thing, not right now, but
(33:51):
a week from now, or a month from now, or
a year from now as you age. One of the
things I think many people learn is that many times
time does heal. Right. Our emotions go up, but inevitably
they do come down right. Our own personal news cycle
is constantly running, just like it is out there in
the media. New things come in to our lives right,
(34:14):
and our emotions of side. So I'll remind myself about
the fact that, you know what, I'll probably feel fine
about this argument at work a week later. And then
the last thing I'll do is I'll take a walk
out in nature. There's some gorgeous data showing how simple
exposures to green space can be remarkably powerful for calming
(34:36):
us down and restoring the psychological resources that we often
need to remain in control. And so that's my trio
of strategies that I rely on Ethan.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
So many questions that I want to ask you, but
time's going to get the better of this, So I'm
going to completely switch gears for one final question, and
this relates to your work that you've done around social
media and wellbeing. We alluded earlier that we might get
to this, and I really want to bring this up.
So recently I spoke with Sarah Coyn at Brigham Young
University had a fascinating conversation with her around what she's
(35:12):
been discovering in her research to do with the lack
of control that both parents and children often feel in
relation to their media being consumed. But also she highlighted
something that Andy Shobulski at Oxford has highlighted, and that
is that there doesn't seem to be any tremendous wellbeing
downsides from reasonable amounts of device and technology usage. What
(35:35):
I'd love to know is what does your research say
about social media wellbeing and in particularly what does it
say for young people and how does this all weave
back into the self control conversation?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Easy question, So this is a you know, I've been
doing researching this space for about ten years and it's
been really interesting to see it evolved. It is very
contentious right now. Number one, I think we need to
not talk about social media or digital screen time as
(36:08):
this monolithic activity, right that's either good or bad. There
are countless ways that people can use social media, and
if you break down different ways of using it, what
you see is just like in everyday life, there are
helpful versus harmful ways of interacting with other people. The
same is true of social media, and so a lot
(36:31):
of the things that we do on social media can
be good for us, help build social capital and social connections.
A lot of the things can be totally benign, have
no implications on how we feel, and yet there can
be other ways that we interact with social media that
tank our emotions. For example, think about things like cyber
bullying and trolling, which are really quite significant phenomena that
(36:55):
have a ton of data behind them. Right The consequences
of being cyberbullied can be extreme. The kinds of fomo
experiences and envy that we experience when we look at
people's curated lives online. So there are many different ways
that we connect with the technology, and I think you
can ask questions about well does time on screen lead
people to feel good? Or bad. And I think Sarah's
(37:19):
right that on the whole that data show well, overall
usage small negative effect on well being, but it's a
really small effect. But if you break things down into
different ways of using the technology, what you find is
that they're healthy and harmful ways of using it. And
I think the challenge for parents is to figure out
(37:41):
what those are so that they can teach their kids
how to navigate social media optimally. In the same way
that we spend much of our parenting life teaching our
children how to navigate the offline world optimally, the same
is true, I would argue for social media.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Yeah, so we've got the way I talk to parents
about this is I'll describe three c's. There's connection, there's consumption,
there's creation when we're online. And my read of it,
and certainly your conversation just now underscores and reemphasizes this,
is that when we're using it for consumption or for
other negative purposes, which is certainly not effective for connection
(38:19):
or creation, we can actually end up with the strong downside.
But if we're using it for connection, we're using it
for creation, we're probably going to have positive experiences online,
and then it just comes down to regulation. Am I
able to get off so that I can get enough sleep?
Am I able to get off so that there's no
impact on my physical well being? I can still go
and be a human? It sounds so sensible when you
(38:41):
say it like that, Ethan.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Yeah, yeah, no, no, I totally agree. And you know
what I tell people is that, look, social media, it's
a new ecosystem that we interact in. It's a new environment,
and environments aren't good or bad, right, It depends on
how you engage with the envite that determines the implications
it has for your emotional life. And I think if
(39:04):
you look at the evidence, you find evidence to support
that idea as well.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
So yeah, right, well, thanks so much. Let's move towards
the conclusion. You've got a book coming out soon. Would
you like to tell us a bit about that book.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Yes, the book coming out. It's called Chatter, The Voice
in Our Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness It,
And it's coming out next January, and it talks about
a lot of the work that we've talked about on
this podcast, but goes deeper, namely, why is it that
our ability to think about our lives sometimes can be
(39:38):
an incredible superpower, but at other times, tank our mood
and our relationships, and importantly, what are the tools that
we possessed to master that ability to introspect?
Speaker 1 (39:51):
That sounds amazing. Available for pre order all soon.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
It's available for pre order. It's on Amazon and all
of well, it's on Amazon. I don't know about all
the other sites yet because I'm a first time author,
but I know you can find it on Amazon, and yeah,
pre order is available.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
Congratulations, Chatter Chatter. I love the sound of that. It
sounds brilliant. To wrap up the podcast, I always ask
five questions of all of my guests. Everyone gets the
same ones, and they're supposed to be reasonably rapid fire,
but if you want to expand on any sometimes we
hear some of our most compelling and delightful stories. So
question number one Ethan Cross. If we asked your two
(40:28):
daughters what their favorite thing to do with you is,
what would they tell.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Us take all time before bed, cooking dinner together, and
traveling to exciting places which don't mean exotic, but exciting beautiful.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
What's been your trickiest parenting moment and don't tell me
that it was that marshmallow experiment where your daughter wanted
the bonuses.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Now, my trickiest moment has been seeing my children deal
with emotional hardship that the source of which is out
of my control, So when other kids are being mean
to them, and just knowing that inevitably there's going to
be more of that in store for them as they
live their lives, and just trying to help them as
(41:17):
I experience their pain, which is not pleasant but probably
a good thing.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
So yeah, it's interesting how many people will offer some
kind of a response along those lines. Watching our children
struggle seems to be an almost universally agreed upon challenge
that they no parent wants, and yet every parent knows
how important that is. It seems to teach them everything
that they need to know about being a great human. Ongoingly,
Question number three ethan, if you could spend an hour
(41:44):
with your two daughters at any age at all, so
you know tomorrow afternoon they walk in the door and
they're waiting for you in the living room at that age,
what age would you pick?
Speaker 2 (41:54):
And why I would take their current age? And the
reason for that is I've found every age to equally
awe inspiring and fun and so, and I'm sure that'll continue.
So their current age.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
No matter how wonderful their current age is and how
glad you are to be in the moment, what are
you looking forward to most as a dad?
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Seeing them succeed at whatever they choose to devote themselves to,
seeing them make a mark on the world in some way,
you know. Seeing my oldest daughter, she recently did community
theater and it was important to her, and I've never
done any kind of theater, but seeing her get up
on the stage and singing dance was just remarkable to
(42:37):
see how she had achieved what was important for her.
And so just watching them both pursue their goals and
hopefully accomplish them, and if not, learning from them and
finding new ones something I look forward to brilliant.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
And the last question, if you could go back to
Ethan Cross as a very young dad having one of
those terribly tough moments, with no experience at all as
a parenting expert, and maybe even without the PhD in
self control and psychology, what advice would you give yourself?
Speaker 2 (43:08):
I would to be less hard on myself and to
likewise remember that incredible mental time travel machine that we
all possess. I think when my kids were young and
parenting was new to me, you can get carried away
with what's happening and not knowing when, when will the
(43:29):
sleepless nights end and so forth, and so just knowing
that things will get better as time goes on would
have been powerful to have a reminder of back then.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Well, Ethan, it's just been an absolute pleasure to talk
with you. So grateful for your generous sharing and your wisdom.
Thank you for being a part of the Parenting in
Perspective podcast.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Wonderful. Thank you so much. What a fun conversation. So
I hope we can do it again.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Well, what a fascinating I hope you've gotten some insight
into Professor Ethan Cross as a result of this podcast.
As I said at the beginning of the podcast, I
just love the fact that he's linked to this all
time classic marsh Mellow experiment and the work of Walter Mitchell,
one of the most important psychologists of the modern era.
Just a quick reminder as well. I can't emphasize this enough.
(44:19):
And Ethan also made the point if you're going to
try that experiment on your own children, their destiny is
not linked directly to the decision that they make about
the marsh Mellow. What we want to do is make
sure that they learn how to self control better, because
the more self control they have in healthy doses, the
better it will be in their lives. Okay, if you're
(44:40):
enjoying the podcast and you reckon it's worth sharing with
other people, could you help out and leave us that
five star review and a comment. Please. The comments and
the reviews and the five star ratings they help other
people to find out about the podcast and find ways
that they can be more informed and make their families
happier and more flourishing. The Happy Families podcast is produced
by Justin Ruland from Bridge Meeting. More information and more
(45:01):
resources to make your family happier are available at happy
families dot com dot mm hmm
This is the Happy Families podcast. Hello, my name is
doctor Justin Coulson. It's so good of you to join
me for today's conversation. This is one that I've been
so excited about for a long long time. Today's guest
has been linked to one of the most famous psychological
experiments ever done. Certainly in the last several decades, this
(00:26):
has become an absolute classic. I'll tell you more about
it in just a sec, but let me introduce my guest.
Doctor Ethan Cross is a professor in the psychology department
at the well look, I'll just say, at the prestigious
Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Ethan
specializes in the study of self control, and he was
(00:46):
mentored in graduate school by Walter Mitchell, who famously studied
delayed gratification with what's become known as the marsh Mellow experiment.
Ethan runs the University of Michigan Emotion and Self Control Laboratory,
and he's won a number of awards over the course
of his career, as well as being featured in publications
including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The
(01:09):
New Yorker, and USA Today. And I began by asking
Ethan about his work and his family life.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Well, so, I run a lab called the University of
Michigan Emotion and Self Control Laboratory, And basically, we do
lots of experiments to try to figure out how self
control works in children and adults. And when I use
the term self control, I mean how can people align
(01:38):
their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with their goals? So it's
really broad. It's really like, if you want to act,
or think or feel a particular way in this world,
how can you do that? What are the psychological tools
that allow you to fulfill those goals? And so that
takes us down a lot of exciting paths that I'm
sure we'll talk about today. And when I'm not working
(01:59):
in a lab with my students and colleagues, I'm both
working and relaxing at home. They have a lot of
work at home too. I've got I'm married to a
woman named Lara, and I've got two daughters, May and Danny,
age eleven and six, who are a lot of fun
and the inspiration for lots of self control experiments.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yeah, I bet do you ever experiment on them? Have
you done the marshmallow experiment with your two daughters.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I have, in fact, a funny story about the marshmallow
experiment with my oldest daughter Maya. So my advisor in
graduate school is actually the marshmallow Man, Walter Michelle.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Now before you tell me about Maya for people who
are not familiar with Walter Michelle and the marshmallow experiment,
because that was going to be my next question. Anyway, Okay,
when I Cyber was talking, I was like, no way.
Ethan Cross was supervised by one of the one of
the modern legends of psychology. He did this marshmallow experiment
that so many people have heard of and even have
(03:00):
seen an a recent resurg and solve it on TikTok
in the last few months through the isolation stage. What
did he do? And then what did you do with
Maya as a result of that?
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Sure, So the marshmallow test, in a nutshell is it's
a paradigm for studying self control in the lab under
control conditions. And what you do is you bring a
kid into the lab and then you give them a choice.
You say you can have one treat now or and
we call it the marshmallow test, but in fact we
use whatever treats the kids like so for some kids
(03:34):
it's raisins, other kids it's pretzels.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
And you show me one child that's going to pick
a raisin over a marshmallow.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Really, there are some we could talk about the question
marks that's surround their match. Or I'm just joking. Some
kids like fruit go figure. So you give them a
choice one marshmallow now or if you wait until I
come back. I have to leave the room for a
little bit. But if you can just sit tight and wait,
then you can have two mars. But the only way
(04:01):
you can have two is if you wait until I
come back. And the experimenter doesn't tell the child how
long it's going to take for them to come back.
So there's uncertainty, which we know everyone who's living through
COVID nineteen right now. Uncertainty can drive emotional responses. And
so this for children is a really difficult choice, right
(04:21):
because all the kids, like Walter and the experimenters are
running these studies. They make sure that everyone wants the
two marshmallows.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
And then normally only around age four, maybe five or
six at the monster. So it's not like self regulation
and self control, which is what we're talking about and
teaching these two kids, It's not like this is intrinsic
to them. At this point. Self control is hard. They
go from zero to one hundred emotionally in seconds, don't they?
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Some kids do and other kids don't. And so that's
part of that's one of the really interesting findings surrounding
this line of work. So you look at so everyone
wants the two marshmallows, but they have this dilemma looking
at this delectable treat, right, they're drooling over it, So
what do they do? So it turns out in one
line of studies they find that the kids who were
(05:09):
able to wait longer, their delay of gratification ability predicts
lots of important life outcomes later on in life, so
how well they do in school, how adjusted they are,
and their relationships and their health. And the idea is
that what this task is tapping into is this basic competency,
this ability to manage our emotions. The other thing that
(05:32):
this line of research tells us, though, is what Walter
did lots of experiments to figure out, well, how can
you direct kids to think differently about the about what
they're waiting for the two marshmallows versus one? What are
the different psychological tricks that you can use, so to speak,
to manage your emotions effectively. And so they did lots
(05:52):
of experiments and found developed lots of insights that informed us,
now many decades later, about what are the tools that
people possess that we can use to control ourselves. So
that's the marshmallow test in a nutshell, and the quick
to bring it back to my family, the fun anecdote is, I,
of course have been waiting like a decade since I
(06:12):
started working with Walter, to have a kid who I
could do this task with. And so I dutifully set
up the task and all the parameters and make sure
I'm doing it by the book, and then give I
sit my down and I describe it and I say okay,
and before I leave, she goes, Daddy, I want one
marshmallow now and I want both later. And so it's
(06:35):
a clear violation of a protocol. And so because I
know Walter or I passed away recently but I knew him,
I picked up the phone and I called Walter and
I said, Walter, you know, have you ever heard of
a child doing this? And all the years that you've
been doing this research And he pauses, and very sternly
he says, Ethan, it's not too soon to start therapy
(06:59):
as an indicator of what the of course was joking,
but the message was delivered well.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
And so you're going to have a long, long, hard
life with the negotiator. That's what That's what he's really saying.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Get ready, buckle in that basically that's right. So and
you know, we maybe we'll get into it later. Maya
has proven to be quite adept at negotiations in the
six years since we've done that task.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
So now, now, before I asked the next question, I
think it's really important to highlight that as a as
a parenting expert or as a psychology researcher, my suggestion
is you probably wouldn't be encouraging parents to do the
marshmallow test at home with their children as a diagnostics
tool to determine how self controlled they'll be throughout their life.
(07:44):
Their destiny is not in their decision around.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Marshmallow, absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
I mean, it's a fun experiment.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
It's fun experiment, and you know the way that the
context in which I used it with my kids was
to introduce them to a scientific experiment and then to
talk about what we've learned. And one of the things
that we've learned, which often gets lost in the translation
of this work when when people talk about it with
the world, is that one of the things we know
(08:13):
is that you can change your self control. You know,
one of my pet peeves is when I hear people
saying you have no self control. That's absolutely not true.
Everyone possesses self control to some extent. Some of us
are better at exerting it in some context as opposed
to others. I may be really good at exerting self
control regulating myself when I'm working on a problem at work,
but maybe I have a little bit more difficulties when
(08:35):
I'm coaching soccer. That's not true. I'm pretty good there too.
But I have my I have my weaknesses. They're associated
with the with the pantry post ten pm at night,
when I crave some foods. We all have our Achilles
heel when it comes to self control. But what we
know is that there are different tools we can use
to improve our self control. And these these these different
(08:58):
things we can do, they're teachable, they're strategies are often
easy to implement, and so I talk to my kids
about the different ways that they can manage the temptation
when it exists, and so absolutely not. You wouldn't want
people to think that scores on that test for their
destiny by any means.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Yeah, and I've done at home with my kids as well,
purely to have the conversation about self control and how
it works. In fact, you've taken me exactly to where
I wanted to go next, and that was just to
talk about how we can teach our children's self control.
And what I'm especially interested in is how does it
affect children who are not developing along the typical pathways.
(09:35):
You know, kids that have got ADHD, kids that have
got autism. What can your self control research teach us
in terms of helping those more narrow, rigid thinking children
to manage themselves.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Well, one disclaimer is we haven't looked at several of
those populations, and there's always this tension between wanting to
generalize from the studies we've done as far as we
can and without having looked at ADHD and autism in particular,
it's hard to make that leap because we're dealing with,
(10:10):
in some cases, very different kinds of populations with their
own unique characteristics. Now, what we do know. We can
say something though about about populations of children who experience
difficulty regulating themselves in general, so not clinical populations, but
groups that are just more impulsive, more prone to anger,
(10:30):
more prone to experiencing temptation. By and large, what we
see is that the more intense the emotional response, the
more effective the different self controls tend to be. So,
and the idea there is, look, if you're dealing with
a little bit of emotion, there's not a whole lot
of room for these tools to help you feel better
(10:51):
or help you rein it in. But as the amplitude
of the emotions go up, the more intense it is,
the more room there is to help bring you down.
And so in some of those that man affects studies,
for example, we've seen that the kids who benefit the
most from that technique are the ones who have the
most difficulty regulating themselves in general, they're the ones who
(11:13):
are benefiting. And so there are lots of open questions
about whether that'll extend to autistic and other populations, but
we do have some inklings that it might. So there
are a boatload of different strategies that people can use
to exert self control both children and adults, and to
be concrete about what I mean by that. We know,
(11:34):
for example, that when people are tempted to act in
particular ways, or when they're trying to control their emotions,
diverting their attention can be really powerful right as a
short term fix. So you might want to have a
person if something is bothering us or tempting us, let's
focus on something else. And for young children in particular,
diverting attention can be a powerful tool if they're looking
(11:57):
at a treat. For example, in the marshmallow studies, one
of the best ways to get kids to wait longer
was to put a little box on top of the
marshmallow so the kids couldn't see it, or to have
the child think about other things, think fun thoughts about
being on the playground with mommy pushing me on the swing.
So diverting our attention away from a thing that's tempting
(12:19):
or bothering us can be one kind of tool. Another
kind of tool deals with the ability of the mind
to change the way we think about things. So we
did a study several years ago. It was a brain
imaging experiment in which we were trying to look at
how people can reduce craving responses to things like pizza
or drugs. Right, we see these temptations, we desperately want them.
(12:44):
And so in one condition, we've had people just look
it up an image of a delicious looking piece of pizza,
and in another condition we had them imagine that a
cockerroach had just crawled across the pizzas. And so that's
just an exam of the power of the mind to
transform the way we think about things, and how we
(13:06):
change the way we think can change the way we feel.
That is the basis of cognitive therapy and cognitive interventions
to change our mood.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
So, in a nutshell, what we want to do without
our children is we want to either divert their attention
so they're not even thinking about it, or make it invisible,
like literally pick it up and move it, or pick
your child up and move your child. And this will
obviously work a lot easier with younger children, but you
can still make stuff invisible. They usually look at your
own wing and say, oh, I can't believe you're taking
that away, But technically that's not self control, that's parent control. Nevertheless,
(13:37):
it will reduce the challenge that you're facing.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Well, I think the way you're describing it right is
the parent is being the agent of control, right right,
This parent control. But what we also can do, and
one of the things we're exploring now is teaching kids
to do this on their own. And so one of
the strike if you look back at some of those
early marshmallow studies, what you see is that some kids
spontaneously do this. Some kids closed there. You can't see
(14:01):
me now, your listeners can't see me, but I'm mimicking
what they do. Some kids put their hand over their eyes.
One girl had really long hair and she flipped it
so she couldn't see the marshmallow in front of her.
Another kid told himself a story, an elaborate story with
imaginary friends. And so these are all different tools that
(14:22):
kids are doing on their own. And so as parents,
we possess the ability to essentially give kids the tools
by distracting them or prompting them to think different.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Hey, that person's bothering you at the schoolyard. But let's
look at the big picture, Maya or Danny. You know what,
they've lots of friends. You don't have to talk with
that person. So we could shift their perspective. But what
we can also do is we can teach children to
do this on their own.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
If you would rattal off, let's say three self control tips,
the top three that come to mind for children who
was somewhere around four, five, six, seven years of age,
you know, those elementary schools, those early primary school years.
What kind of tips would you give parents if they
want to help their kids to develop the self control
to not eat the marshmallow or the pretzel or the raisin.
(15:09):
Right where did they go?
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Well? I think one is attention. So teaching them how
to divert their attention away from whatever's tempting them and
give themselves something to focus on is even more powerful.
So really get them to focus in on something that's
equally engaging, but not the thing that's tempting them. So,
if you don't want them to watch TV, give them
a really fun buzzle to work on or something like that,
(15:33):
or problem to work on. Another thing is changing the
way they think about something. So if they're looking at
the candy and they really want to eat it, ask
them to imagine, well, you know, imagine that. I guess
kids aren't tempted by bread. What is it candy basically
mostly right, I mean, imagine that someone stepped on it,
(15:53):
you know, or those kinds of transformations can be powerful, right,
So don't think about it as a marshmallow. Think about
it as a puffy cloud, right, So play with it
in your head, and importantly when you play with it,
don't think about the things that are most Oh my god,
I'm going to think about how it's going to taste.
If you've talked to your child about the negative health
(16:15):
implications of eating too much candy, or negative health implications
for a child like tummy aches, right, not feeling good after,
have them think about that, so, you know, think about
the fact that too many marshmallows can make you not
so healthy, and that's not a good thing. You have
to go to the doctor, and so forth and so on.
A third strategy you can use to give you the
(16:36):
last one is you can try something called what we've
called the Batman effect. So have a child pretend find
their favorite superhero. And as so, superheroes are usually generally
really good at at exercising restraint, right, and being able
(16:57):
to do good things in the world. And so in
some studies, what a colleague of mind Stephanie Carlson has
found is that having children imagine they're superhero, use their name,
Imagine you're Batman, and say what would Batman do right now?
Would Batman be able to not eat the marshmallow? Or
Dora the Explorer? What would Dora do? That can be
(17:18):
really powerful transports them into this other role which gives
them some distance from the temptation and also this superpower
to restrain it. And so that's been a fun strategy
that kids have been able to benefit from in some experiments.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
I love the Batman effect, and what I really love
about that piece of research is, well, first of all,
we're looking at how people who speak to themselves in
that sort of alter ego way, you know, what would
Batman do? What would Wonder Woman do? What would the
bill to do? Versus come on, Ethan, you've got this
(17:54):
versus I know what I would do? You know, these
three different conditions, And you found in this study that
kids person longer. They just they had more motivation, They
had a greater level of self control and tenacity. So
I've been talking to adults about that and saying, when
you're up against something where you don't want to exert
the kind of control that's necessary, or where you're struggling,
or you don't want to persevere, or you're ready to
(18:15):
explode at your children and you just need to regulate
your emotions. Don't necessarily think about what Batman would do,
but think about who your inner mental mentor might be.
You know, think of Ethan Cross or many people, unfortunately
for me, will say that, I just think about what
you would do if you or what I would do
if you were watching me. I know that ancient and
(18:35):
modern traditions have encouraged that. So there's the Christian tradition
of wearing the WWJD bracelet what would Jesus do? And
I think that. I mean, that's a kind of a
self control strategy, really, isn't It's a psychological or self
distancing strategy.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Absolutely. You know this idea of distance. Really what it
boils down to is that it's almost like giving yourself
a time out in the moment. So it's a stability.
When we experienced strong emotions, they often narrow our attention
in on exactly what it is that's driving those responses,
and that zooming in can make it really difficult to
(19:13):
take the broader picture into account. If I am too
intolerant with my children, how might that affect them long term?
So this ability to just hit stop for a moment
and zoom out can be really powerful, and there's lots
of research which shows that. And in fact, this is
a project that where we've been working on for the
past five years. It's called the Toolbox Project. For the
(19:36):
past ten years or so, I've been teaching a class
here may a little bit less than ten years called
the Science of Self Control to University Michigan undergrads, And
it's essentially science's great as hits when it comes to
what we've learned over the past fifty years about how
to control our emotions, our thoughts, our behaviors. And it's
always a really fun class to teach. The students love
(19:56):
the material, they're engaged. And the way it works is
every week students come in, they read stuff and I
pepper them with questions, and then the final day we
reverse the roles. They come in with questions. For me,
it's their last day. Here's what's on my mind. Now
that I've gone through the whole literature, I've digested it
(20:16):
and so forth. And about five years ago, this one
girl named ariel. She raised her hand like really defiantly
as soon as the class started to wanting to be
called on, and so I called on her, and she says,
why are we learning about this now? I go, well,
what do you mean? She goes, well, you know, we've
(20:37):
gone over all of these different strategies that exist, dozens
of strategies that can help us be happier, healthier, get
better jobs, and so forth. Why did anyone teach us
about this earlier on in life when it could have
helped us, like when we were kids or adolescents. And
so the first thing I said was, fear not, life
is not over. You will still have opportunities to use
(20:59):
these strategies once you leave college. But then I did
something I don't want to say it was, it was
slightly cowardly. I did what many politicians do when they
don't have a good answer to a question. I deflected
and I threw it back to the class and I said, well,
what do other people think? Why why haven't you learned
about this yet? And the reason I did that was
(21:19):
because I didn't have a good answer to that question.
And so it got me thinking a lot about why
aren't we teaching kids about what we know about how
the mind works when it comes to self control. We
teach children about how the digestive system works. We teach
them about geometry, we teach them about social studies. These
(21:41):
are just concepts. These are these are topics that we
think are important, and so they're in the they're in
the kind of canon of what we expose them to
in school. Well, the mind seems kind of important and
we've learned about it, so why aren't we also teaching
them about this? And so fast forward five years. What
we've been doing is a group of scientists like myself
(22:05):
have paired up with educational experts curriculum designers to essentially
take the science of self control, what do we know
about the different tools that exist, and we've translated that
into a curriculum for middle and high school kids, so
a little bit older than the ages that you were
asking about. But the idea was that this was a
(22:27):
good place to start, and so we took the science,
which can be filled with complicated terms that scientists love
to use, but we've made it simple and with engaging exercises.
And what we're doing now is we are looking at, well,
what are the implications of teaching children about these strategies.
In some of our early studies we know we have
(22:48):
dated to show that the kids who go through this curriculum,
they do in fact learn the material right. So you
do a test at the beginning and at the end
of the curriculum their knowledge of the science of so
control increases. And what we're getting ready to do with
about ten thousand students next year is we're going to
test to see what effect does learning about these strategies
(23:10):
have on these students' ability to regulate themselves down the
road in life. And the hypothesis the prediction is that
knowing about these strategies should provide these kids with resources
that they could draw upon when they need them, in
the same way that knowing how to compute a percentage
(23:32):
allows us to determine the tip when we go to
a restaurant. The idea is that when a kid is
angry or tempted, if they're motivated to control those urges
or emotions, they should have a knowledge base to fall
back on in those instances.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Earlier, you defined self control. I'd like to now define
emotional regulation. But I'm not sure that there's got to
be an enormous difference in what you said previously. You know,
that idea of harnessing your your faculties and characteristics and
directing them towards a goal effectively was my summary of
your your definition. Would you would you be switching that
up at all for emotional regulation?
Speaker 2 (24:17):
You know? I don't. And a disclaimer, you know for
all of all the people listening, is that scientists are
really good at coming up with different terms that differ
in ever so slight ways, and that could be useful
when we do experiments. But I think the self includes emotions,
(24:37):
it includes behaviors, and includes thoughts and cognitions, and so
when you're talking about controlling the self, self control, to me,
it's a whole kitten kaboodle. So I use the broadest
definition of self control. It's aligning thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
with goals. Now, now that doesn't mean that self control
is always a good thing, because it means that if
(24:59):
you have of bad goals right, the better you are at.
Self control means that you can do bad things right.
So for example, let's say I have the goal of
of of of of committing a crime right, which might
be very challenging for me to emotionally, it might be
hard to hurt someone else. If I have good self control,
(25:22):
that might help me do that. So so self control
in my world is not always good, right.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
And our kids aren't necessarily planning on committing the any
any grievous and we hope not.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
No, that's right, And so in all of our studies,
we're giving them goals that are healthy goals. Of course,
I think that's in most of cases. That's where self
control is being hardness towards.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
I'm fascinated though, by this idea that self control can
sometimes be a bad thing, and it's not necessarily just
in pursuit of negative goals. Sometimes that self control can
also become counterproductive when our children become so rigid and
so focused, and we as adults as well, we become
so focused on something that is good and worthy and useful,
(26:07):
but it's actually going to come at such an extraordinary cost,
and our life gets out of balance. You know, there's
all this Angela Duckworth, who I know you've worked with
her work around being gritty and persevering through tough times.
Paul Tough wrote a book called How Children Succeed. It
was all about teaching kids grit, making sure that they
do the hard yards. And there's obviously a very strong
(26:29):
argument for having that gritty determination and perseverance, having the
self controlled, but there's also a pretty strong argument about
having the wisdom to know when to step back and
just let go. Can you talk a little bit about
why self control isn't always the most important thing, or
isn't always going to be functional and optimal for our
children or for ourselves.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
So many things are interesting about what you said. I mean,
this idea of wisdom is stepping back, right, There is
another illustration of the value of distance, disability to step
back and tick, take stock of what you're going through
and then decide how to behave I think your question
speaks to this issue of that human beings are complicated.
(27:10):
We are not driven to achieve one goal. We live
in a world filled with multiple goals, right, so goals
to succeed at work but also to succeed in our
personal lives. And those goals don't always conflict. As many
people know who are trudging away at work at eight
pm when they might want to be home with their family,
and so there are trade offs that we are constantly
(27:32):
trying to maintain it take stock of and balance and
so forth, and it gets complicated. So, you know, although
most of our experiments focus on one goal, that's not
the world in which we live. And I think people
who are better able to balance all of the different
goals that are on their plates and manage them accordingly
(27:57):
are more likely to be in a position to be
living the kind of life they ultimately want.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Who are these perfect people? Where are they? How do
we study them?
Speaker 2 (28:06):
They're in Australia, of course, of course, So I think
this is you know, this is unfortunately where a lot
of the science stops right now, because most of the
work we do and thus far has been studying specific
goals under tightly controlled conditions. And the reason for that
is it's much harder conceptually and practically to do experiments
(28:30):
when there are seventeen goals that are all conflicting. So
I wish I could tell you who these people are.
There are likely exemplars that we could find and then
try to study in the same way that we Sometimes,
you know, one approach to science is finding people who
are really good at something, you know, the Michael Jordans
of their industries, and then trying to figure out what
(28:51):
makes them tick and then you run experiments on them.
But to my in my mind, we haven't yet done
that on the exemplars of self control.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I think that it's a really interesting conversation though, and
I know we're kind of going off script a little
bit here, but to me, this idea that some parents
will take a conversation about self control and say, Okay,
well I want my child to get into this university
course or have this opportunity in life, or just you've
got to learn self control. Because the dun Eden study
(29:21):
showed the children who learn self control do better at school,
and they're less likely ended up in prison, and they're
going to have more successful marriages. You know, this was
this thirty plus year study of how self control is
associated with all these positive outcomes. So we've got to
teach your self control and all of a sudden life
becomes too controlled. Whether it's pursuing academics or whether it's
(29:43):
pursuing the extracurricular things like piano or ballet or whatever
that thing is that our children are doing outside, you know,
becoming an Olympian swimmer, whatever it might be.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Well, I think a big part of that equation has
to do with number one, what you as a parent
and the child the value right because our goals right, Like,
so what are the goals that we have and which
are most important to us? There are going to be
people out there who, for them, the most important thing
(30:17):
is getting into that desired college or getting that job.
And if that's the case, you can make an argument
that helping that child fulfill that goal is really important.
But let's say people have multiple goals like that are important.
I'm not just getting into the best school, but also
having great relationships and enjoying the moment. Well, that would
(30:39):
suggests a different course of action. I mean, look, I
study this stuff. I'm a presumed expert on this topic,
and I'd be lying if I told you that my
wife and I are constantly doing a kind of of
self and family evaluation of our kids, their goals, our goals,
and how we can give them the best possibility of
(31:03):
living a happy life. Like we want them to be
successful more than that, we want them to be happy.
And you know, I think we are stumbling our way
through like many parents with forward progress. Of course, if
we invite my and Danny on the podcast, they might
say something different. The first step is being mindful of this.
(31:24):
Simply being aware that life isn't driven much of the
time by one goal, but by many is an important
insight that can be useful for helping parents think about
how they want to structure their kids' activities and lives
given these multiple goals that they may have for their
kids and that their kids may have for themselves.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Ethan, I appreciate the vulnerability and you, I guess confessing
outing up to the fact that you're kind of making
it up as you go along, even if you've got
the professorship in psychology, because I feel the same way.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
You know.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
I've written six books, I've got the PhD in positive psychology,
I've run a bajillion seminars on this stuff, and there
are days where I look at my wife and say,
I don't have a clue how we're supposed to manage it.
You tell me, and she'll look at me and as hell,
you're the expert you told me. I'm like, I don't know. Anyway,
let's move towards a conclusion. There's a couple of other
(32:20):
questions that I want to ask you before we get
to my five questions that always wrap up every podcast.
Something that strikes me as vitally important is that emotions
are contagious. Kids catch their parents cranky, they catch our chaos,
they catch our crazy, but they also catch how calm.
The same strategies that we've discussed for younger children, I'm
(32:42):
sure that they work for adults as well for parents.
But I'm curious if there's anything else that you would
add here. How else can parents stay calm and appropriately regulated?
What strategies would you share for parents who are just
over it some afternoons or evenings or mornings.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
I tell you about the strategies that some of the ones,
some of my favorites that I rely on. Because there's
a boltload of strategies there at least a dozen two
dozen out there that have science behind it. We don't
have time to get into them all, but let me
tell you what I do. One thing I do is
I will rely on that linguistic distancing. So when I'm
in the heat of the moment, I'm anxious or I'm angry,
(33:20):
I will use my name silently to think about what
I'm going through.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Ethan's ed, why are you talking to yourself in the
first person? What's going on here?
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Yeah? Yeah, definitely you definitely want to do that silently.
That's an important caveat, and that's helpful. Another thing I'll
do is something that we call temporal distancing jargon. Again,
think of it as mental time travel. This can be
a very powerful tool. I'll imagine about how am I
going to feel about this thing, not right now, but
(33:51):
a week from now, or a month from now, or
a year from now as you age. One of the
things I think many people learn is that many times
time does heal. Right. Our emotions go up, but inevitably
they do come down right. Our own personal news cycle
is constantly running, just like it is out there in
the media. New things come in to our lives right,
(34:14):
and our emotions of side. So I'll remind myself about
the fact that, you know what, I'll probably feel fine
about this argument at work a week later. And then
the last thing I'll do is I'll take a walk
out in nature. There's some gorgeous data showing how simple
exposures to green space can be remarkably powerful for calming
(34:36):
us down and restoring the psychological resources that we often
need to remain in control. And so that's my trio
of strategies that I rely on Ethan.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
So many questions that I want to ask you, but
time's going to get the better of this, So I'm
going to completely switch gears for one final question, and
this relates to your work that you've done around social
media and wellbeing. We alluded earlier that we might get
to this, and I really want to bring this up.
So recently I spoke with Sarah Coyn at Brigham Young
University had a fascinating conversation with her around what she's
(35:12):
been discovering in her research to do with the lack
of control that both parents and children often feel in
relation to their media being consumed. But also she highlighted
something that Andy Shobulski at Oxford has highlighted, and that
is that there doesn't seem to be any tremendous wellbeing
downsides from reasonable amounts of device and technology usage. What
(35:35):
I'd love to know is what does your research say
about social media wellbeing and in particularly what does it
say for young people and how does this all weave
back into the self control conversation?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Easy question, So this is a you know, I've been
doing researching this space for about ten years and it's
been really interesting to see it evolved. It is very
contentious right now. Number one, I think we need to
not talk about social media or digital screen time as
(36:08):
this monolithic activity, right that's either good or bad. There
are countless ways that people can use social media, and
if you break down different ways of using it, what
you see is just like in everyday life, there are
helpful versus harmful ways of interacting with other people. The
same is true of social media, and so a lot
(36:31):
of the things that we do on social media can
be good for us, help build social capital and social connections.
A lot of the things can be totally benign, have
no implications on how we feel, and yet there can
be other ways that we interact with social media that
tank our emotions. For example, think about things like cyber
bullying and trolling, which are really quite significant phenomena that
(36:55):
have a ton of data behind them. Right The consequences
of being cyberbullied can be extreme. The kinds of fomo
experiences and envy that we experience when we look at
people's curated lives online. So there are many different ways
that we connect with the technology, and I think you
can ask questions about well does time on screen lead
people to feel good? Or bad. And I think Sarah's
(37:19):
right that on the whole that data show well, overall
usage small negative effect on well being, but it's a
really small effect. But if you break things down into
different ways of using the technology, what you find is
that they're healthy and harmful ways of using it. And
I think the challenge for parents is to figure out
(37:41):
what those are so that they can teach their kids
how to navigate social media optimally. In the same way
that we spend much of our parenting life teaching our
children how to navigate the offline world optimally, the same
is true, I would argue for social media.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Yeah, so we've got the way I talk to parents
about this is I'll describe three c's. There's connection, there's consumption,
there's creation when we're online. And my read of it,
and certainly your conversation just now underscores and reemphasizes this,
is that when we're using it for consumption or for
other negative purposes, which is certainly not effective for connection
(38:19):
or creation, we can actually end up with the strong downside.
But if we're using it for connection, we're using it
for creation, we're probably going to have positive experiences online,
and then it just comes down to regulation. Am I
able to get off so that I can get enough sleep?
Am I able to get off so that there's no
impact on my physical well being? I can still go
and be a human? It sounds so sensible when you
(38:41):
say it like that, Ethan.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Yeah, yeah, no, no, I totally agree. And you know
what I tell people is that, look, social media, it's
a new ecosystem that we interact in. It's a new environment,
and environments aren't good or bad, right, It depends on
how you engage with the envite that determines the implications
it has for your emotional life. And I think if
(39:04):
you look at the evidence, you find evidence to support
that idea as well.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
So yeah, right, well, thanks so much. Let's move towards
the conclusion. You've got a book coming out soon. Would
you like to tell us a bit about that book.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Yes, the book coming out. It's called Chatter, The Voice
in Our Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness It,
And it's coming out next January, and it talks about
a lot of the work that we've talked about on
this podcast, but goes deeper, namely, why is it that
our ability to think about our lives sometimes can be
(39:38):
an incredible superpower, but at other times, tank our mood
and our relationships, and importantly, what are the tools that
we possessed to master that ability to introspect?
Speaker 1 (39:51):
That sounds amazing. Available for pre order all soon.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
It's available for pre order. It's on Amazon and all
of well, it's on Amazon. I don't know about all
the other sites yet because I'm a first time author,
but I know you can find it on Amazon, and yeah,
pre order is available.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
Congratulations, Chatter Chatter. I love the sound of that. It
sounds brilliant. To wrap up the podcast, I always ask
five questions of all of my guests. Everyone gets the
same ones, and they're supposed to be reasonably rapid fire,
but if you want to expand on any sometimes we
hear some of our most compelling and delightful stories. So
question number one Ethan Cross. If we asked your two
(40:28):
daughters what their favorite thing to do with you is,
what would they tell.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Us take all time before bed, cooking dinner together, and
traveling to exciting places which don't mean exotic, but exciting beautiful.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
What's been your trickiest parenting moment and don't tell me
that it was that marshmallow experiment where your daughter wanted
the bonuses.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Now, my trickiest moment has been seeing my children deal
with emotional hardship that the source of which is out
of my control, So when other kids are being mean
to them, and just knowing that inevitably there's going to
be more of that in store for them as they
live their lives, and just trying to help them as
(41:17):
I experience their pain, which is not pleasant but probably
a good thing.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
So yeah, it's interesting how many people will offer some
kind of a response along those lines. Watching our children
struggle seems to be an almost universally agreed upon challenge
that they no parent wants, and yet every parent knows
how important that is. It seems to teach them everything
that they need to know about being a great human. Ongoingly,
Question number three ethan, if you could spend an hour
(41:44):
with your two daughters at any age at all, so
you know tomorrow afternoon they walk in the door and
they're waiting for you in the living room at that age,
what age would you pick?
Speaker 2 (41:54):
And why I would take their current age? And the
reason for that is I've found every age to equally
awe inspiring and fun and so, and I'm sure that'll continue.
So their current age.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
No matter how wonderful their current age is and how
glad you are to be in the moment, what are
you looking forward to most as a dad?
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Seeing them succeed at whatever they choose to devote themselves to,
seeing them make a mark on the world in some way,
you know. Seeing my oldest daughter, she recently did community
theater and it was important to her, and I've never
done any kind of theater, but seeing her get up
on the stage and singing dance was just remarkable to
(42:37):
see how she had achieved what was important for her.
And so just watching them both pursue their goals and
hopefully accomplish them, and if not, learning from them and
finding new ones something I look forward to brilliant.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
And the last question, if you could go back to
Ethan Cross as a very young dad having one of
those terribly tough moments, with no experience at all as
a parenting expert, and maybe even without the PhD in
self control and psychology, what advice would you give yourself?
Speaker 2 (43:08):
I would to be less hard on myself and to
likewise remember that incredible mental time travel machine that we
all possess. I think when my kids were young and
parenting was new to me, you can get carried away
with what's happening and not knowing when, when will the
(43:29):
sleepless nights end and so forth, and so just knowing
that things will get better as time goes on would
have been powerful to have a reminder of back then.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Well, Ethan, it's just been an absolute pleasure to talk
with you. So grateful for your generous sharing and your wisdom.
Thank you for being a part of the Parenting in
Perspective podcast.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Wonderful. Thank you so much. What a fun conversation. So
I hope we can do it again.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Well, what a fascinating I hope you've gotten some insight
into Professor Ethan Cross as a result of this podcast.
As I said at the beginning of the podcast, I
just love the fact that he's linked to this all
time classic marsh Mellow experiment and the work of Walter Mitchell,
one of the most important psychologists of the modern era.
Just a quick reminder as well. I can't emphasize this enough.
(44:19):
And Ethan also made the point if you're going to
try that experiment on your own children, their destiny is
not linked directly to the decision that they make about
the marsh Mellow. What we want to do is make
sure that they learn how to self control better, because
the more self control they have in healthy doses, the
better it will be in their lives. Okay, if you're
(44:40):
enjoying the podcast and you reckon it's worth sharing with
other people, could you help out and leave us that
five star review and a comment. Please. The comments and
the reviews and the five star ratings they help other
people to find out about the podcast and find ways
that they can be more informed and make their families
happier and more flourishing. The Happy Families podcast is produced
by Justin Ruland from Bridge Meeting. More information and more
(45:01):
resources to make your family happier are available at happy
families dot com dot mm hmm
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