Delayed Gratification

I’m a proud father of 2, a 9- and a 12-year-old, and like all parents I want my kids to have a great childhood and grow up to be happy and well-rounded adults.

This desire for them to be happy is often at odds with the responsibilities we have as parents. Part of me wants to give them not only all they need, but also all they want. But this would do no good for them, so I need to constantly remind myself to artificially add constraints and learn to say NO.

If you are reading this on a digital device, you may be living, just as I am, in a fortunate country where we can provide our kids with pretty much whatever they want whenever they want it.

Sometime over the last few decades, it seems like kids lost what used to be long waiting times between special occasions to receive gifts, and instead became more frequent consumers through us (the parents).

There used to be a delay between kids deciding they wanted something and when they actually got it (if at all). This natural delay vanished over the years as we transitioned to cheaper goods, a never-ending onslaught of media, and unlimited access to games requiring no dedication or commitment to “finish” (but that’s a topic for another post).

By instinct, I always had a feeling that this new age of easy access to everything couldn’t come for free. My feeling was confirmed when I learned about the concept of “delayed gratification”.

Delayed Gratification

One of the most important challenges we face in life is the need to delay gratification. The ability to either forgo immediate temptation or to persist in an undesirable activity, in order to reach a later goal, is a key component to success in many life tasks. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01649/full

Turns out, delay of gratification is not an ability we are born with, but one we develop over time. It is critical that we as parents act accordingly to help our kids build and practice this skill.

This is one of the reasons I created DareScouts, a tool to help parents bring back some of that old-fashioned delay between wanting and reward where we would otherwise cave in and pay our way out of days or weeks of saying “not yet, wait until…”.

The DareScouts model is very simple:

• Parents define goals or chores.
• Kids reach these goals or perform these chores to get points.
• Rewards can be claimed once enough points are accumulated.

These concepts, while simple, allow great freedom in what values we as parents want to encourage and nurture in our children. Sometimes we may want to encourage goals like “read every day,” while other times we want to delay the gratification of receiving some desired item: “get 20 gold points if you want that extra XBox controller”.

I encourage you to give it a try, register for free https://darescouts.com.