Pleasure deferred

I'm not particularly crazy about candy -- but once upon a time, as a child, I certainly was. 

In our Christmas stockings, and as birthday gifts, my brother and I would be blessed at times with boxes of candy.  Really good candy.  I remember especially long boxes of chocolate mints, like Girl Scout mints but better, and square "Sampler" type boxes of chocolate cherries.  As I say, I'm no longer so crazy about candy, but if I still were, chocolate mints and chocolate cherries would be right up there at the top of my cravings.

My brother and I were equally crazy about such candy -- but whereas his entire box would be devoured within a few days, mine would still be largely intact months later.  I'm "Saving for the Future," I would tell him primly, smugly aware of my own virtue.  He would roll  his eyes and remind me of all the times I had finally got around to eating the last of my goodies, and had found them stale and nearly inedible.

And he was right.

If I had been a bit older, I could have justified my self-satisfaction by throwing around the term "delayed gratification" -- a miserly approach to candy that arguably augurs well for the future of the child who displays it.  As this week's Economist relates, Stanford researchers in the 1960s devised a cognitive experiment often called "the marshmallow test."  Essentially they put a marshmallow in front of a young child and told him that he could eat it any time he wanted, but if he waited a certain period of time, he would get two marshmallows (think 401k plans).  Data show that the older the child, the longer he's willing to wait for the bonus.  But if you take two children of the same age, the one who waits longer is more apt as a teenager and an adult to defer other forms of gratification -- and to reap the rewards.

Everyone assumes that kids have become increasingly self-indulgent over the past fifty years.  But a researcher at UC Santa Barbara has examined reams of testing data and has discovered that there has been a steady increase, decade by decade, in the amount of time kids are willing to wait for that second marshmallow -- and that this is true of all kids, "good" and "bad."

No one knows why the increase. 

But think twice before you tell your child or grandchild that kids back in the day were thriftier, or better disciplined, or more apt to "save for the future."  Unless, of course, you're like me.  And have some old bars of Snickers in the back of a cupboard that have solidified to the point that you can no longer bite into them.  Or bottles of wine -- long-ago gifts from friends who didn't don't know my habits -- that have turned to vinegar.

I wonder ... I wonder if they still make chocolate cherries?