How to Teach Self Control to Children

Self-control is not obedience, and it cannot be installed by consequences alone. It is a capacity that develops over about two decades, and the adult's job is less to demand it than to create the conditions in which a child gets to practise it and gradually take it over.

Borrowed before it is owned

Very young children have almost no capacity to regulate themselves. What they have instead is an adult who does it for them: the calm voice, the steady body, the predictable response. This is co-regulation, and it is not a lesser version of self-control; it is the developmental route to it.

A child regulates alone by first being regulated with somebody, thousands of times. The internal version is built from the external one.

A child cannot practise calming down in a house where nobody stays calm. They have never seen the thing they are being asked to do.

Roughly how it unfolds

• Two to four. Almost entirely borrowed. Expect big feelings and very little capacity to hold them. The work is the adult staying steady.
• Four to six. The first signs of waiting, taking turns, stopping mid-action when reminded. Fragile, and it collapses when tired.
• Six to eight. More reliable in familiar situations. A child can start to name what they are feeling, which is a significant step.
• Eight to eleven. Can hold a rule without a reminder much of the time, and can wait for something worth waiting for.
• Eleven and beyond. Adult-like in calm conditions, and markedly less so among friends, when tired, or when something matters intensely.

What actually builds it

• Be the calm. The single largest contributor. Your steadiness is the material they are building with.
• Name it while it is happening. "You are really frustrated with that." Naming a state is the first step to managing it, and children cannot do it for themselves at first.
• Let them wait, in small doses. Not cruelly, but a child who never waits never practises waiting. Turn-taking games are the easiest version.
• Rules held consistently. A predictable limit is something a child can organise themselves around. An unpredictable one requires constant vigilance instead.
• Play that requires it. Board games, team sports, dramatic play with roles. Children exercise more self-control in play they have chosen than in any situation an adult imposes.
• Protect sleep. Self-control is the first thing to go when a child is short of it.
• Teach a move, not just a rule. "Come and find me" or "squeeze the cushion" gives a child something to do instead. "Calm down" gives them nothing.

About the marshmallow study

The famous experiment, children who waited for two sweets did better in later life, is worth knowing about mainly because of what came afterwards. Larger replications found the effect much smaller, and substantially explained by family background and circumstances. A child in an environment where promised things do not always arrive is behaving sensibly by taking the sweet now.

The useful lesson is not that early self-control determines a life. It is that self-control depends heavily on whether a child's world has been reliable, which puts the emphasis back on the environment adults build.

You are not teaching a child to suppress themselves. You are lending them your steadiness until they have grown their own.