ABSTRACT
A long time ago, when The Beatles, paisley, and pillbox hats were all the rage, Walter Mischel made a living tempting small children with marshmallows (Leher, 2009). He gave each child a choice to have one marshmallow immediately, or, if he or she could wait until Dr. Mischel returned, the child’s reward would be two marshmallows (Mischel, Zeiss, & Ebbersen, 1972). The child also was given the option of ringing a bell to have him return sooner, but this would result in only being given one marshmallow. Years later, Mischel followed up with those participants from the 1960s, who were then well into their forties and decidedly opposed to pillbox hats. Mischel and colleagues found that those children who rang a bell with little delay from the time he left had surprising adult outcomes, including reports of lower attention and SAT scores, and higher body mass indexes relative to their childhood peers who waited longer (Casey et al., 2011). Mischel’s work is a powerful example of the importance of the development of self-regulation, which, as the readers of this handbook can well appreciate, is an overarching term referring to how children coordinate thoughts, feelings, actions, and desires to achieve goal-directed actions (Hoyle & Brad eld, 2010). The Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman has underscored Mischel’s ndings that early selfregulatory capacities can set a child on a path for optimal development by highlighting how “noncognitive” skills equivalent to self-regulation can predict adult outcomes such as earnings, savings, and reduced criminal activity (for a review, see Heckman 2006; Hoyle & Brad eld, 2010). Given these arguments, a gap in self-regulatory skills that emerges in early childhood may trigger a poor developmental trajectory (e.g., Bull, Espy, & Wiebe, 2008). For children with atypical development, early impairments in self-regulation may be of particular concern because de cits in one area could lead to cascading effects in other areas as well (Karmiloff-Smith, 1997).
