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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My experiences as a teacher and, later, as a student taught me that effort is the most important key to reaching your full potential. I wish I could say that that knowledge automatically translated into views and actions always aimed at helping my kids learn to value effort. But I have to admit that I sometimes slipped. Sometimes I took a shortsighted view of their education and acted as though I thought that A’s were the most important thing.

Now, I’d be willing to bet that almost every one of us would like our kids to get all A’s. The problem is that when their grades become the most important thing, we’re focused on short-term goals – goals that we don’t have a whole lot of control over. So we wring our hands with worry when they struggle with a difficult assignment. And when they make a mistake – when they don’t study the right stuff or don’t study long enough and don’t do well on a test – we fret and pull out our hair. In short, we’re not the sturdy presence our kids need if they’re going to develop the traits vital for long-term academic success.

At my best, I took a longsighted view of my kids’ schooling. When things got good and challenging, when they became full of doubt and began to worry that maybe they just weren’t smart enough, I’d encourage them to keep at it. I’d remind them (and myself) that uncertainty and confusion are always on the way to learning new things – that, in fact, those are the clearest signs that your brain is on the verge of getting stronger. And when they made a mistake and felt like a failure, I’d remind myself to see it as chance for them to build essential resilience and with it a self-confidence that comes from knowing how to bounce back. And then I’d get busy helping them develop strategies for doing just that.

Taking a longsighted view also meant that I had to change my line of questioning. When I inquired about a test or a project, instead of simply asking my teens, “How’d you do?” or “Are you done yet?” I asked some questions about the learning process as well. Below is a sampling of the types of questions I learned to ask.

For Everyday Schoolwork Ask:
– What’s challenging and new about this? Is any part of it boring?
– What’s your favorite class right now? What kinds of questions are you asking in that class?

After a Test Ask:
– Did the test today do a good job measuring what you’d learned?
– While taking the test, did you learn something more? Or did you see something in a new way or see some new connections among the things you learned? (Good tests should do those things.)

For Projects and Papers Asks:
– Did you get stuck at some point? What did you do to get unstuck?
– Did you get a surprising “Aha!” or two along the way?
– Was there ever a point where you got so into what you were doing that you lost track of time? (See researcher Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discussing this highly motivated state called “flow” in a Ted Talk. He gets to the good stuff at 14:00.)

Educator and author Dr. Michael Riera encourages parents to ask these kinds of questions to help teens view learning as an enjoyable, life-long process. He calls them “questions that linger” because they often need time to percolate. And he cautions against worrying that your question is a bad question if your teen doesn’t have much to say right away.

I noticed the lingering effect of these process questions at our house. My teens’ answers sometimes cropped up days later – at the dinner table or when we were in the car together. But after a while I noticed something else was happening too. My teens had caught on to my line of questioning. They began to anticipate what I might ask and to have answers at the ready. Sometimes, even without my prompting, they’d volunteer information about their process for learning or about their opinion of their work.

I learned firsthand that when we parents focus more on our teens’ effort and what they’re learning, they will too. And that’s exactly the kind of focus they’re going to need if they’re going to do the work required to reach their full potential.

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