Willpower

when the boys had grown up and were in their forties and fifties, the notes were studied by a researcher named Joan McCord, who compared the teenage experiences with subsequent adult behavior—in particular, criminal behavior. A lack of adult supervision during the teenage years turned out to be one of the strongest predictors of criminal behavior. The counselors had recorded whether the boys’ activities outside of school were usually, sometimes, or rarely regulated by an adult. The more time the teenagers spent under adult supervision, the less likely they were to be later convicted of either personal or property crimes.
    The passage of decades has not erased the value of parental monitoring. A recent compilation of studies on marijuana use, totaling more than thirty-five thousand participants, showed a robust link to parental supervision. When parents keep tabs on where their children are, what they do, and whom they associate with, the children are much less likely to use illegal drugs than when parents keep fewer close tabs. Similarly, recent studies of diabetic children have found multiple benefits of parental supervision. Adolescents have higher self-control to the extent that their parents generally know where their offspring are after school and at night, what they do with their free time, who their friends are, and how they spend money. Although type I diabetes comes on early in life and may be mainly a result of genes, the adolescents with high trait self-control and high parental supervision have lower blood sugar levels (thus, less severe diabetic problems) than others. In fact, having a mother or father who keeps track of the child’s activities, friends, and spending habits can even compensate to some degree for lower levels of self-control, in terms of reducing the severity of diabetes.
    The more that children are being monitored, the more opportunities they have to build their self-control. Parents can guide them through the kind of willpower-strengthening exercises we’ve discussed earlier, like taking care to sit up straight, to always speak grammatically, to avoid starting sentences with “I,” and to never say “yeah” for “yes.” Anything that forces children to exercise their self-control muscle can be helpful: taking music lessons, memorizing poems, saying prayers, minding their table manners, avoiding the use of profanity, writing thank-you notes.
    As they strengthen their willpower, children also need to learn when not to rely on it. In Mischel’s marshmallow experiments near Stanford, many children tried to resist temptation by staring right at the marshmallow and willing themselves to be strong. It didn’t work. Staring at the forbidden marshmallow kept reminding them of its allure, and as soon as willpower slackened for a moment, they gave in and ate it. By contrast, the children who managed to hold out—who waited fifteen minutes in order to get two marshmallows—typically succeeded by distracting themselves. They covered their eyes, turned their backs, fiddled with their shoelaces. That marshmallow experiment caused some researchers to conclude that controlling attention is what matters, not building willpower, but we disagree. Yes, controlling attention is important. But you need willpower to control attention.

Playing to Win
    For more than half a century, television has distracted children from other pursuits, and for more than half a century it’s been blamed for just about everything that’s wrong with kids. We don’t want to join the generalized TV bashing, because we’ve seen children learn lots of useful things from television. But one thing they don’t learn is how to control their attention. Successful television shows know how to grab and hold attention without making the same mental demands as other pastimes. Web surfing isn’t quite as passive, but it doesn’t foster much discipline either, particularly if you’re just flitting from one site to another, never pausing to read anything longer than a tweet or a short post.
    So how can children learn to focus their attention on something longer than a text message and more challenging than a YouTube video? The usual advice is to get them reading books, and we’re only too happy to endorse that. (What author isn’t?) But they can also work on attention by playing the right kinds of games, starting well before they’re old enough to read. Some of the most successful recent self-control programs have