Within-Child Variability in Choosing to Delay Gratification in a High-Poverty, Racial/Ethnic-Minority Sample: Relations With Family Instability

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Abstract

Delay of Gratification (DoG)—i.e., a proclivity to choose later rewards over less valuable, immediate rewards—is a robust predictor of welfare in many domains of life (Duckworth, 2011; Mischel, 2014; Moffit et al., 2011) and is often thought to reflect a relatively stable ability (Beck, Schaefer, Pang, & Carlson, 2011). Yet, young children adjust their proclivity to delay gratification in the face of uncertainty (Kidd, Palmieri, & Aslin, 2013; Mahrer, 1956), and the extent of their adaptivity is related to their cognitive flexibility (Lee & Carlson, 2015). Further, children from low-socioeconomic status (SES) families are disproportionately exposed to chaos and family instability (Evans et al., 2005; Moore et al., 2000), which predicts DoG behaviors at age 4 (Sturge-Apple, Davies, Cicchetti, & Hentges, 2017), perhaps reflecting a disruptive role for children’s general trust in future events.

The interpretation of DoG as reflecting not just self-control, but also adaptive decision-making processes, makes variability in DoG performance an interesting subject for study. This study investigates variability within children in DoG choices across three repeated measures – at the beginning of kindergarten (Time 1), first grade (Time 2), and second grade (Time 3) – in a sample of predominantly Black children from low-income families (88% Black, 96% receiving free or reduced-price lunch). Relations between variation in DoG and variation in family instability across these same time points are also explore. This repeated measures provides a more direct test of DoG choices as a stable trait within children and a test of instability as a dynamic predictor of DoG behaviors than afforded by prior studies (e.g., Beck et al., 2011; Sturge-Apple et al., 2017).

Proclivity to delay gratification exhibited only modest stability within children in this study – with only 14% of total variance being attributable to stable, child-level differences. This is in conflict with theoretical conceptualizations of DoG as a stable aspect of temperament (e.g., Beck et al., 2011).

Fluctuations in family instability were significantly and negatively related to within-child variability in proclivity to delay gratification, as expected, but, only after parsing out instability in caregivers’ intimate partnerships. Prior studies have typically operationalized family instability in a manner akin to characteristic of a child’s home environment, measuring it once – or using a single sum of events over many years – when considering its relations with child outcomes (e.g., Sturge-Apple et al., 2017). The present results indicate that the extent of recent exposure to family instability – relative to each child’s typical exposure to instability – is related to variation in children’s DoG performance. After taking into account these relations between fluctuations in instability and in choice DoG performance, average levels of family instability are not related to average levels of performance.

Author

• Chelsea Duran, University of Virginia