Walter Mischel

Self-control is crucial for the successful pursuit of long-term goals. It is equally essential for developing the self-restraint and empathy needed to build caring and mutually supportive relationships. It can help people avoid becoming impervious to consequences, or getting stuck in jobs they hate. It is the ‘master aptitude’ underlying emotional intelligence, essential for constructing a fulfilling life.

The child who can’t wait a minute can manage to wait for twenty when he changes his thoughts about the temptations. To me, that finding is more critical to the long-term correlations because it points the way to strategies that can enhance self-control ability and reduce stress.

Arguably the best answer to the ‘What can we do to help our children?’ question is to model what you would like them to become.

Who we are and what we become reflects the interplay of both genetic and environmental influences in an enormously complex choreography. It is time to put away the ‘How much?’ question because it cannot be answered simply. As the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb noted long ago, it’s like asking, What’s the more important determinant of a rectangle’s size: it’s length or its width?

We are both ants and grasshoppers, and to lose the hot emotional system and live continually dominated by the cool cognitive system in the service of a possible future can become a life story as unsatisfying as its opposite.