The marshmallow test and success

All parents wonder if their child will be successful in life.  

In the late 1960s and early 1970s led by psychologist Walter Mischel, then a professor at Stanford University carried out a number of tests to determine exactly what led to success in later life. In these studies, a child was offered a choice between one small reward (sometimes a marshmallow, hence the name of the test) provided immediately or two small rewards if he or she waited until the experimenter returned (after an absence of approximately 15 minutes). In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores,  educational attainment,  body mass index (BMI) and other life measures. 

Now comes a book that offers a more holistic view of success factors. It states that what determines success is a triple package of qualities- superiority, a sense of insecurity and impulse control.

Chua and Rubenfeld’s explosive new meditation on success, The Triple Package asks the charged question of why certain ethnic groups do better than others, why certain populations instil in their children an ability to succeed to a greater extent than others. They present evidence that certain immigrant groups in America – Jews, Asians, South Asians, Iranians, Cubans, Nigerians – seem to thrive, largely in economic terms, in test scores, college admissions, net worth and income, while others seem to have a harder time. They also look at the disproportionately large number of Asians in top music schools, of Cubans in Florida politics, of Indians in finance, and of Jews among successful comedians. Why, they ask, do some groups produce more bankers, lawyers, doctors, famous fashion designers, bestselling authors, than others?

They go on to argue that these “successful” groups cultivate in their children a “triple package” of qualities. The first is superiority: children are encouraged to feel superior, chosen, special, turning outsider status into a badge of honour. But they believe that this sense of superiority, of being better than banal mainstream culture, has to be combined with a rousing sense of insecurity, a haunting feeling that nothing you do is ever good enough; it is the combination of these two qualities that leads to achievement, to the kind of obsessive drive that they admire. The last part of “the triple package” is “impulse control”. In a dominant culture that places a premium on immediate gratification, on hanging out, on fulfilment over hard work, on expression over effort, the ability to defer, to control, to be disciplined is also part of the “package”.

Chua and Rubenfeld are very critical of the self-esteem movement, which is to say the warm bath theory of parenting that espouses children feeling good about themselves no matter what. “You can’t raise your child saying, ‘You’re perfect, you’re amazing, everything you do is amazing,’ and give that person the drive to get somewhere,” Chua says. “Self-esteem has to be earned to be really internalised, in order for a child to have that unbreakable sense of superiority.” Her point is that if you praise your children for mediocre grades, for not scoring goals, for painting a blah painting, they know in their hearts that they have not succeeded, and you do not foster a real or enduring sense of achievement. According to this very intriguing logic, many of our efforts to protect or support our children are, in fact, crippling them.

What’s the alternative though? Chua calls it “grit parenting” and it involves instilling an ethic of work, of overcoming obstacles, of discipline. She points out that in many walks of life, not just business or law, even artistic ones, you need to be resilient, you need to work through rejections and setbacks. You can’t always call your mother to fix things.

Notably missing from their rigorous and intimidating definition of success is the minor question of  happiness. It’s true, though, that when people say they just want their children to be happy, they usually mean happy in a certain way, or according to certain ideas of a successful life. Most people, if they are honest, mean happy with an asterisk. “There are a host of good, decent people who are not ambitious, who are not climbing, who may have the best lives of all,” says Rubenfeld, “We are just not writing about those people.”

Also the talk of “success” will also irritate and provoke. However complex or subtle the analysis, certain readers will feel they are being ruthlessly labelled failures. They will feel an implicit brutality, a dismissal of the variety of successes, and the faltering of dreams, in the judgments of who is “successful”. By defining and pinning down success, you are also defining and pinning down “failure”, which will make people uncomfortable. 

One thing that Rubenfeld and Chua do not seem to condone is “living in the moment”, which they call a “hollow” way to be. The idea of planning, seeing the outlines of the future, following a bigger picture, takes on for them an almost moral urgency. The joy of idling, of luxurious, wasted summer days, mornings whiled away in bed, seems not to be part of their vision of “triple package” success.

And yet, in a world in which people are immensely anxious about their children’s futures, these thorny questions of success do occupy our imaginations. We run our kids ragged with lessons, enriching them within an inch of their life, for fear they will slip through the middle-class standard of living in a harsh, new future that we envision but can’t quite understand. This is a cultural moment in which an unprecedented amount of energy is being poured into creating “successful” children and yet we seem often to be floundering and misguided in how precisely to do that. 

In the end it is often the rogue surprise, the moment when the child breaks out and reaches for independence, when the “package”, whatever it is, falls away, that the fun, by which I mean the true or deepest happiness emerges.