Circle time rituals help children beat the Marshmallow Test of Self Control
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Sweet, old-fashioned circle time rituals involve young children sitting in a circle with a teacher and copying his or her specific actions as closely as possible. These rituals can seem a bit out of place in today’s culture with its emphasis on the importance of independent thinking, and the ubiquity of interactive educational games employing the latest beeps and whistles of technology. But a new study in Child Development says there is something about the conformity and attention to detail in ritualistic games that makes them a highly effective way to improve children’s executive functioning (their mental nimbleness) and self-control.
Veronica Rybanska at the University of Oxford and her colleagues tested two groups of 7- and 8-year-old children, one from Slovakia, the other from Vanuatu in the Southwest Pacific. The children first completed tests of their executive functioning and self control. The executive functioning test involved learning to respond accurately to reversed commands, such as touching toes when hearing the command “touch your knees”. The self control test was a version of Walter Mischel’s classic Marshmallow Test: if the children could resist eating a single piece of chocolate for 15 minutes, they could have three afterwards.
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