TEACHING KIDS PATIENCE

All of us are born impatient, many of us die still struggling with impatience.

But most of us learn how to cool it. We learn to not interrupt when someone else is talking, we wait in line at the market and airport, we can recognize the needs of others and postpone our own gratification.

So how do parents help that screaming baby who wants to be fed RIGHT NOW become a more patient person? Patiently! It takes a long time. Plus one of your important parenting jobs is to model patient behavior for your children.

It starts with meeting the infants needs so he or she will learn that the world is a pretty good place and other people help you when you're hungry or wet. Then we teach the fun of giving something up so you get it back like when you roll a ball. We teach about sharing and taking turns.

Board games help the preschooler and school age children learn to wait their turn and cope with that very important truth: "I can't always win."

I recommend that at about age 5 parents to start reading "big" books. The typical preschooler book can be read in a few minutes but when a parent reads a chapter or a few pages of a Harry Potter book or similar length at bedtime, the child learns to wait for the next installment.

Baking is another activity that helps teach patience. It takes time for the cookies to bake. Planting flowers or vegetables takes even more time between the task and the payoff of putting the pansies in a vase or eating the carrots. Building something like a birdhouse takes patience as well as skill.

Saving for a "big" purchase like a bike helps teach patience as well as the value of money. On the other hand if you give your children everything they want the instant they want it, you are removing any incentive for them to wait patiently for what they long for.

Don't model impatient behavior. Instead of drumming your fingers and cussing when you're stuck in traffic, tell your kids, "It can't be helped. Let's play a guessing game."

In our complex world there are many times we have to wait like at airports. Let's face it, waiting is boring. To me a book is an antidote for boredom so I always carry a book or a crossword puzzle with me and encouraged my children to do the same.

Finally, nature helps teach patience. Watch the sun come up or set--it doesn't happen instantly. Lie down at dusk so you can look up and watch the stars pop out. Sit quietly in the woods and wait for a deer to come by. Or wait for a fish to bite at your favorite fishing hole.

Children today live in a sound bite, instant gratification world but the wise parent counters this with many little, age-appropriate patience lessons.

Adults live in a world of delayed gratification. Our paychecks come days or even weeks after we've done the work. We put in many hours practicing musical instruments or driving golf balls to improve our performance. We wait until the end of a meal to savor dessert, or shun it so that we can lose five pounds by the end of the month.

Investments of time and effort come much harder to young children, many of whom appear to live by the motto, "I want it, and I want it now!" Given the choice between eating one jellybean immediately and getting two jellybeans ten minutes later, many young children find they just can't wait.

The ability to wait for rewards becomes increasingly important as children grow older. School is filled with delays of gratification. To be successful and graduate, many children must learn to forgo time on the baseball field in favor of studying multiplication tables. To get along with friends, they must learn to wait their turn at games and to share their toys.

Psychologists have found that some children—especially boys—who have a lot of trouble waiting are likely to have difficulties in other areas later on. Boys who are impatient tend to be disruptive at home, disliked by their peers, and poor at solving interpersonal problems. It's unclear why girls who are impatient tend not to have the same pattern of problems.

There have been some very interesting laboratory experiments, many conducted by Dr. Walter Mischel at Columbia University, to measure the delay of gratification among young children. A typical experiment involves bringing a child into a room that contains, among other things, a bell. After the child and the experimenter spend some time together, the child is shown a pair of treats or small toys, one of which the child perceives as much better than the other.

The experimenter then explains that she has to leave the room for a few minutes, but that the child can call her back immediately by ringing the bell. The child is told that if he waits for the experimenter to return on her own, he'll get the better treat; if he rings the bell, he'll get the treat he doesn't like as much. Once the experimenter leaves, she watches the child through a one-way mirror or video camera.)

This experiment and others have found that those young children who are able to delay gratification the longest tended to approach the situation differently than those who rang the bell early and settled for the lesser reward. The children who waited usually distracted themselves by thinking about things other than the treats. Typically, they found something to play with while they were alone in the room.

Those who rang the bell early tended to focus their thoughts during the waiting period on the reward. In other words, it's easier for a child to wait for a cookie if he plays with a toy than if he simply stares at the cookie jar and thinks about how good the treat will taste.

Those children who came up with strategies to delay gratification in some of Dr. Mischel's studies had some surprising and long-term advantages over those who rang the bell soon after they were left alone. Ten years or more after they were tested, the children who could distract themselves were found to have done better academically and appeared to handle frustration better than their peers.

Although early patients and higher school performance were correlated, it's unclear whether the former causes the latter. Still, it makes intuitive sense that teaching a child better skills at delaying gratification will help him later on.

So what can you do? If you're trying to help your child become more patient and less frustrated, the first place to look is in the mirror. Young children are very sensitive to how their parents delay gratification. If you aren't patient in dealing with your own frustrations, your child will probably act that way, too.

Here are some things to try:

• Adjust your expectations to the age of your child and the situation. Remember that kindergartners have a very different sense of time than teenagers do. To a five-year-old, a delay of an hour may seem like an eternity. Also keep in mind that children become more impatient when they're under stress.
  
  
• Suggest things for your child to think about while he's waiting. Without such suggestions, many young children focus their thoughts on things that will probably make them more impatient, such as how good a piece of candy will taste or how much fun it will be to play with a toy. Teaching your child to distract himself when he has to wait will make the waiting less frustrating.
  
  
• Get involved in projects with your child that require you both to be patient. At first, these should be projects in which the delays are measured in minutes, not hours or days. As he becomes more proficient at postponing gratification, you can shift to longer, more complex projects.

Baking cookies together, for example, is a wonderful way for your child to begin practicing patience. It may feel like it takes a long time to go from mixing the dough to letting the cookies cool once they're out of the oven, but the child can see the steps involved in each stage, and learn to distract himself for relatively short periods of time. Most important, he gets to eat the results at the end.

The impatient person is angry because the tree refuses to bear fruit before due season. Impatience assumes God is not acting fast enough-that we creatures grasp events better than the Creator in whom we live and move and have our being.

Those who do things before their appointed time fail in their endeavors, because conditions conducive to success have not yet been prepared. Acting on faith, however, we cooperate with our all-wise Father's schedule and experience peace in relinquishing responsibility over events beyond our control. We no longer carry so many of earth's weary burdens, and being thus released, are free to work all the harder on the tasks uniquely our own. We cease making personal plans for the lives of others since we are called to love our brothers, not to pressure them to act contrary to their own free will.

Impatience evidences lack of submission to Father's will. The impatient person has his own plan, which seems to him superior to God's. Most lethally, impatience tempts him to seek short-cuts, to do things his way instead of God's. But such hurry-along efforts come to naught, because the multitude of circumstances necessary for their success is not yet in place. Our Father's schedule is supreme, and nothing of true value happens apart from it. God supplies both the power which makes possible, and the pattern for, all lasting accomplishment.

While impatience takes too much action, stagnation¾fearing to live¾does not take enough. Stagnation carries the rutted feeling of being looped in unproductive patterns of living. We linger in such wasteful and monotonous experience out of fear that even if we tried, we would fail to extricate ourselves, and should we by some fluke succeed, life outside the rut would probably be worse. Stagnation's cure is prayer to know God's will, then bold, committed ACTION grounded in faith in God's ability to bring about his perfect will in, through, and for us.

Water becomes stagnant when it doesn't move. Likewise, spiritual atrophy sets in when we fail to risk acting according to our highest concept of God's plan for our lives. Stagnation and impatience are opposite poles of a common problem¾lack of submission to Father's plan. There are times to wait and there are times to act, and those who follow God's spirit are guided as to the proper time in all their actions. Worship and service bind us to the heart of God, provide the spiritual energy for decisive action, and make us increasingly effective in those fields of service to which we are called.

Spiritual stagnation results from failing to seek spiritual truth and pass along what we have received to others. Those who serve can never become stagnant, for Father leads them into ever more challenging and fruitful avenues in which his love can be revealed. Those with surfeit of this world's goods may stave off stagnation by a frenetic procession of ever-changing toys, but in the service of God, even common toil is holy and sacred.

Stagnation bespeaks absence of challenge, which in turn betrays the lack of a living spiritual connection with God, who continually moves us into higher realms of service. We should therefore submit to Father's will and make his plans our own in every particular, trusting in his wisdom and loving-kindness, for apart from him we are nothing.