Delayed Gratification and Youths

Apr 29, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Over the past few weeks as I listened to the back and forthing on the budget, I remembered thinking while I used to be there, how easy it is to forget that in the end, the whole point about governmental interventions is to empower citizens to take charge of creating their own success. To focus, even with the best of intentions, on the fact that just giving handouts is to further sap our self-reliance.
Last week we spoke of the gradual diffusion into other cultural groups of the Creole trait to be, in the words of former President Desmond Hoyte, “constantly preoccupied with the exigencies of the moment.” He claimed this was, “one of the most pernicious consequences of slavery.”  He’d continued, “And so, lacking a social motive, he developed no interest in, or aptitude for, making long term arrangements. Moreover, the colonial polity which succeeded the era of slavery did not provide the former slave and his descendants with significantly greater incentive or opportunity for cultivating these pursuits. Thus, there persists in our society, even to this day, a reluctance to focus too intently on the future.”
This attitude is one of the major fetters of our development both in terms of our national and individual stunted growth. The question we posed was whether we have to accept this as our lot and suggested that the answer was “no!” We can do no worse than ask how the attitude of hedonistically living for the moment was inculcated in us. It certainly wasn’t genetically imprinted! It was socially constructed, and therefore it can also be socially deconstructed and replaced with attitudes that foster the willingness to plan and work for the future.
Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting we resort to whips and the rack – but rather, the same institution the ex-slaves were herded through after slavery for their socialisation – the schools and other educational institutions.
While we might have rectified some (but certainly not all) of the debilitating premises of our post-slavery schooling that continued to hegemonise our minds into the last half a century, even Desmond Hoyte did not develop his insight into a programme to reverse the debilitating trait he discerned. As such, our schools are almost exclusively concerned, especially at the younger ages, with developing children’s cognitive skills. Now there is nothing wrong with this in and of itself: studies have shown consistently that there is an unequivocal and unambiguous correlation between cognitive ability and later success in life.
But we often find that even the willingness to develop cognitive skills, or in parents, to promote such skills in their children, are themselves dependent on the willingness to look beyond the present and into the future. And crucial to moving from the cramped and crabbed present into a liberating future of economic, academic and other measures of success, is the ability of children to control their impulses and delay gratification.
And if we think about it, it was this quality that enabled the immigrant groups that were brought into Guyana to move ahead of the Creoles. Interestingly, when those same Creoles went to, say the US as immigrants – imbued with the attitude of controlling impulses and delaying gratification – they outstripped the native descendants of slaves there. It might not be all in the mind – but that has a lot to do with it.
In most instances these successful individuals were able to bootstrap their way upwards through imitating the habits of other successful individuals and groups. But we don’t have to allow the process to be based on “luck and chance”. Studies have shown that when youths are placed in self-control situations in a structured manner and allowing them to experience the potentially negative consequences of impulsive behaviour, they will increase their ability to delay gratification. The same goes for teaching them the benefits of a future time perspective. There are now programmes out there to impart future thinking.
While all children can benefit from this kind of training – and this is what I have been engaged with since I have left the political arena to work with youths – with our scarce resources, it may be best to identify and begin with youths that exhibit low self-control and are therefore suffer the greatest risk of ending up as ‘failures”.
As the authors of the study that prompted this refection suggest: “Because children from disadvantaged backgrounds often score low on self-control ability, and may also be those for which parents may least be able to promote these skills, interventions as part of the formal education may therefore serve distributional purposes. Instead of redistributing (economic) outcomes later in life, such early interventions allow children from disadvantaged backgrounds to develop better self-control skills. In this way, it is possible to redistribute along the whole spectrum of life outcomes, including outcome categories that are otherwise hard to redistribute, like health, occupational skills, and education.”

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