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> Keyword here is "once", kids love it _once_ they're there. The point is that -at the time when the parent is asking the kid to stop what they're doing and shower- they (don't want to / don't understand why they should / etc...) stop what they're doing.

Yeah but that seems like a completely different concept from delaying though, they're not any _more_ gratified being in the bath than they would've been playing tag or whatever they were doing before. And again it doesn't apply if you make it not something regular they have to do, getting kids to change what they're doing like swapping games isn't anywhere near as hard as getting kids to swap games where one of them is a bath.

> Take a look at the Stanford marshmallow experiment[1].

I know all about the Stanford Marshmallow experiment, it's a miserable abortion of an experiment that everyone talks about like received wisdom when every attempt to repeat it's long term findings has like half the effect if you account for even the slightest confounding variables.

(Sorry I'm dunking on it so much, I had to write a paper on it during my degree, everything they found about the kids doing better in life because they could delay gratification completely disappears once you realise that the kids who could wait were just the kids who grew up with more money and never had to worry about food at all, and once you account for parental income and stability you find out the differences in life outcomes are entirely caused by familial wealth.)

Read the follow up studies section if you want to know what I'm talking about, some of the confounding variables they didn't account for include "early cognitive ability and behaviour, family background, and home environment" but also trust in the researcher, if the child had had a promise broken by an adult even _kind of_ recently they were far more likely to fail the test.

Also having read a lot of those studies for that paper, I can say that even the Wikipedia article feels a bit generous to it.

</rant>

> There's nothing inherent in what the word discipline means that signifies anything regarding doing what needs to be done. It's more about doing what you understand to be good for you later, even if you don't fully (or irrationally) don't want to do now, specifically if it's a small sacrifice now for a greater reward later.

Yeah that sounds right actually. I never thought of it like that, thank you.




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