Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and marshmallows

The Daily Drip

Here's how the marshmallow test goes:

You put a kid in front of a marshmallow and say "I'm gonna walk out of the room and I'll be back soon. If you wait and don't eat the marshmallow until I get back, I'll give you a second marshmallow. If you eat the marshmallow now, that's all you get."

2 minutes is a long time for a kid to be in front of a marshmallow without an adult.

It turns out that kids who waited long enough to score the second marshmallow were correlated with what were defined as successful outcomes later in life.

In fact, there are many studies now that support the idea that children who are better at managing their feelings are more highly correlated with success later in life. At the time, this was called "delaying gratification" in the psych literature, but now you'll see it as part of the more broadly defined category of emotion-regulation.

Emotion regulation is also part of the Social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum that is just beginning to be taught in schools.

Here's what Mr. Rogers thought about this over 50 years ago when he was using Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood to teach kids SEL on TV:


"What Do You Do?"

"What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong...
And nothing you do seems very right?

What do you do? Do you punch a bag?
Do you pound some clay or some dough?
Do you round up friends for a game of tag?
Or see how fast you go?

It's great to be able to stop
When you've planned a thing that's wrong,
And be able to do something else instead
And think this song:

I can stop when I want to
Can stop when I wish
I can stop, stop, stop any time.
And what a good feeling to feel like this
And know that the feeling is really mine.
Know that there's something deep inside
That helps us become what we can.
For a girl can be someday a woman
And a boy can be someday a man."

- Fred Rogers, 1968