I’ve observed that in group activities my daughter (who is an only child at home)will often wait to get her share of snack, craft supplies etc.. when they are being passed out. Other kids rush to front & grab. Often she can come up with the short end of the stick when it comes to getting her choice or share of something.

Blame for the short attention spans, of course, was thrown on iPods and other devices. The schools and their guiding philosopies, philosophies in which all these kids had been immersed for over a decade, were never listed among the suspects.

Bart,
Many high performing high schoolers get to college and find out that all of that delayed gratification was for naught, or the gratification is empty. They tend to turn to instant gratification with a vengeance, be it liquor or drugs, sex, etc. I don’t agree that most young adults are purposely delaying gratification in college; more, their peer group has social mores that keep them from ditching class or punting assignments This is evidenced by large groups of college kids who do act in these ways–punting class, skipping assignments. You don’t make it to a top 4 yr university with skills in delaying gratification, so you can assume most students have the ability to do it. But culturally, they need it reinforced for them to still behave this way.

It already has been. It’s pretty well documented that one of the big psychological differences between chimps and humans is impulse control. I just recently watched a documentary that showed something very similar to the marshmallow experiment, comparing adult chimps and young humans.

As for teaching impulse control, what happens when you consistently push children to defer gratification, but never supply the reward?

It’s a pity that schools have stopped stressing self-control, planning for the future….

Here’s the old Seattle school document stating that having a future time orientation is an example of cultural racism!  (Note that the controversy over this definition has caused the page to be pulled, but it’s still there at the Wayback Machine.)

That such nonsense was ever part of policy in a public school system is an outrage; that the people who wrote and accepted it are probably still on the payroll is an obscenity.