Roxane Lehmann, Ph.D.

Labor Day has come and gone. Homework season is upon us. And if your household is like most, you have at least one kid who makes homework a hassle.

You know the drill: How he engages you in debates to avoid getting at his schoolwork. How she waits until late to start her homework each night. The way he rushes through the assigned work and fails to focus. Her lack of persistence and quickness to give up when the work gets challenging. And the hours he’d spend playing video games or watching TV on school nights instead of studying if left unsupervised.

This whole list of hassles has to do with self-discipline – a trait we all have to varying degrees. My two kids’ capacity for self-discipline varied so much that I sometimes wished I could pour what each had in a bowl, mix it up, and hand it back out in more equal helpings. I cared because as a middle school teacher I’d seen firsthand how crucial self-discipline is to academic success.

A range of studies over the last several years has confirmed what I observed in my classroom. Self- discipline matters when it comes to school achievement. In fact, it matters even more than you might think.

In one study (journal article found here), researchers Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman followed over 160 eighth graders for an entire school year. Their goal was to find out what matters more in predicting school grades – IQ or self-discipline.

Once school started in the fall, each eighth grader took an IQ test, and each of them (as well as their parents and teachers) answered survey questions that probed for traits related to self-discipline. Students were asked “Can you work effectively towards long-term goals? Are you good at resisting temptation? Or does fun sometimes keep you from getting work done?” In addition, students’ ability to delay gratification was measured using a real-live test: Each was given an envelope with a dollar bill inside and told they could keep the dollar or give it back and get two dollars a week later.

When the researchers returned at the end of the school year, they took a look at the students’ report cards and then compared each student’s final grades with their IQ scores and how self-regulated each had been back in the fall. The researchers found that self-discipline was not only highly predictive of success, but accounted for more than twice as much variance as IQ in a student’s end of year grades.

What’s more, highly self-disciplined kids outperformed their equally smart peers on every academic performance variable measured: They earned higher standardized achievement test scores, had fewer school absences, spent more time on their homework, watched less television, and started their homework earlier in the day.

As I read this research, I thought about how my kids would have responded if as 8th graders they’d been given that delayed gratification test. No doubt, my daughter would have handed the dollar bill right back to the researchers without wavering. My son, on the other hand, would have probably pocketed the dollar. For years I wondered how two children raised in the same home with the same rules and expectations could differ so much when it came to self-discipline. I suspected the difference had to be in their genes – at least to some extent.

Sure enough, a just published study (discussed in brief here) of more than 800 sets of twins suggests just that. Researchers found that the identical twins (who have the same DNA) were twice as likely to share character traits as their non-identical twin counterparts. And of all the traits examined, the genes were most influential on individual’s self-discipline. In fact, genes mattered more than home environment in forming self-discipline.

So it seems that some people are simply less tempted by short-term pleasures and distractions than others. They’re born that way. But this does not mean that we should just throw-up our hands as if the whole thing is beyond our control. Because researchers have recently discovered that self-discipline – a trait so important to success in school and beyond – is like a muscle. With regular exercise this trait will grow and improve even into adulthood. The downside is that, just like a muscle, self-discipline can get worn out from overuse.

Next week’s posting will take a look at some specific things you can do to help your teen build self-discipline and some quick-fix approaches for restoring it when their supply has been depleted.

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Last week NPR’s Kai Ryssdal spoke with Freakonomics coauthor Steve Levitt in a segment that endorsed the use of money to bribe kids to do well in school. (You can see the interview here.) Levitt’s recommendation flies in the face of what researchers who study motivation (e.g., Alfie Kohn, Edward Deci, and Rchard Ryan) have shown about nurturing enthusiasm for learning.

For many kids bribing is counterproductive.
Studies over many years have found that bribing kids to get them to alter their school achievement behavior is rarely successful at producing lasting change. Typically, when the rewards stop, kids return to the way they acted before, often with even less enthusiasm for learning.

Motivation experts explain this discouraging but remarkably consistent finding by describing two distinct types of driving forces: 1) intrinsic motivation, which is a desire to complete a task for its own sake and 2) extrinsic motivation, which is a desire to complete the task mostly because it’s a requirement for getting something else). As educational researcher Alfie Kohn put it, “The more we want children to want to do something, the more counterproductive it will be to reward them for doing it.”

Most schools use grades to quantify learning. And grades spur many kids who are motivated by a combination of ambition and fear of what will happen to them in the near and distant future if they don’t do their homework and get good grades. For these kids grades add the extra nudge they need to get at their homework when their intrinsic interest in learning isn’t quite enough to get them there.

But bribing can help some kids.
Some kids are not motivated by grades. And if these kids’ intrinsic interest in school achievement flags, they can get off track and go nowhere. In an earlier blog, I suggested that when this happens, parents intervene and provide more structured, supervised study time to help get their kids back on track. In my practice, I’ve found that these kids often put up less resistance when they are rewarded for studying. And I often recommend that parents use money or other tangibles as bribes to get their kids to do the required studying.

Rewarding these kids for regularly doing their homework makes it more likely that they’ll go along with the new regime and stick with it long enough to experience some of the intrinsic benefits of getting their work done. Most find that they like getting less grief from their teachers and parents. Most like the fact that they’re earning better grades. And a series of small successes can help these kids build self-confidence and provide an opportunity for them to view academic success as a source of personal satisfaction and perhaps even a matter of self-responsibility – instead of just a way to please others and earn tangible rewards.

The bottom line …
So while I’d not suggest rewarding your teen for studying if they’re thriving academically, I would encourage you to consider doing so if you have an unmotivated teen who is floundering. Some experts advise letting floundering teens fail, claiming that they’ll learn from their failure. My experience indicates that most teens don’t learn from failure. Instead, they just keep floundering as their attitude, self-confidence, and willingness to work go further downhill.

Bribing your unmotivated teen just might get them going in the right direction. And there’s a chance that the extrinsic motive for getting assigned work done will eventually be transformed into an internalized, personally endorsed value.

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