My Kid Flunked the Marshmallow Test

When our son Aryn was about three, I gave him the Marshmallow Test. You know the one. You seat your child at a table and put a marshmallow in front of them. Then you give them a choice: they can eat the marshmallow anytime they like, but if they wait 15 minutes, they’ll get a second marshmallow.

You can see YouTube videos of the original Marshmallow Tests, conducted at Stanford University at a time when experimenting on children was socially acceptable. They were carried out in what looks to be a police interrogation room, complete with one-way mirror.

The allure of the Marshmallow Test was that it was purported to be an easy, sure-fire way to tell if you should deplete your kid’s college fund and use the money to build a bed-sit in your basement for them, or if you could stop your retirement savings plan and go on lavish vacations, knowing you’d someday have an all-expenses-paid in-law suite in your child’s sprawling mansion.

This was because, when the researchers followed up with the marshmallow tots a decade later, they found those who held out for the second marshmallow were way ahead of their more piggly peers in every respect, from grades and health to ambition and obesity. Even for those who did eat the marshmallow, the longer they waited correlated to later success in life. The average wait was six minutes.

So I sat Aryn down at our kitchen table with a marshmallow, and began explaining the instructions. I had barely finished my last sentence before Aryn grabbed the marshmallow and stuffed it straight into his mouth.

He had waited not even a nanosecond.

My dreams for how I would decorate our stylish in-law suite in Aryn’s house, with its home gym and patio access to the pool, crumbled before my eyes.

But wait! Perhaps Aryn hadn’t understood the instructions! I placed another marshmallow before him, yet again he rammed it straight into his mouth.

Clearly, Joe and I had failed somewhere. I could almost hear the cash register ching-chinging as it tallied up the costs of tutors, therapists, and life coaches.

“Can I go now?” Aryn asked me, clearly oblivious to his future of doom.

“In a moment,” I replied sadly. “I just want to know – why couldn’t you wait to get the second marshmallow?”

Aryn stared at me as if I was daft.

“Because,” he said, “I hate marshmallows.”

He continued on, patiently. “They’re mushy, like the inside of a slug. If I waited the 15 minutes, I would only get more slug guts.”

I had never thought of that. I wondered how many children had been saddled with low expectations, simply because the researchers had assumed all children like marshmallows.

“So,” I countered hopefully, “if I had given you something you like…”

“Like a cookie?”

“Yes! Would you have waited then?”

“No.”

My shoulders sagged once more.

Sensing my disappointment, he tried to soothe me. “But maybe tomorrow.”

“Why tomorrow?”

“Because today I’m having fun playing, and I’d rather play for 15 minutes than sit at the table for 15 minutes.”

In my eyes, my son ramped up from failure to genius in 60 seconds. He wasn’t done yet.

“How about you give me a cookie now, I’ll eat it, then I’ll go play for 15 minutes, and then come back for two more cookies?”

I cheerfully agreed before realizing that my skilled little negotiator had actually convinced me to give him three cookies in total.

More than two decades have passed since then, and I can confirm that Aryn far surpassed the prediction of his failed Marshmallow Test. He’s always marched to the beat of his own drummer, and he has a degree, a great job, a stellar spouse, and even his own home – although there’s no room for an in-law suite.

Still, I wonder how many other kids, like Aryn, were considered failures simply because they didn’t like marshmallows, or didn’t want to give 15 minutes of their life they could never get back. What of those kids who considered a marshmallow in the hand to be better than two in the bush?

Maybe, instead of thinking that children have failed a test, it’s time we consider that perhaps the test has failed the child.