Importance of Self-Discipline

• Childhood self-discipline is a predictor of adult quality of life.
• Variation exists among people of the same age regarding self-control.
• The capacity for self-control over thoughts and actions is a fundamental human ability.
• The inability to use self-control can lead to personal failure.
• Self-discipline is highly sought after.
• People are living longer than ever, which requires more focus on long-term health and wealth.
• Managing retirement savings and resisting advertising require foresight.
• High-calorie foods are prevalent, while many jobs involve little exercise
• The value of individual self-control is increasing for well-being and survival.
• Working parents must balance roles and priorities.
• Divorce and addictive substances are readily available options when times are tough.
• Maintaining a healthy family requires willpower.
• Parents teach children self-control and emotional regulation.
• Head Start did not boost IQ scores as intended, but it did lower rates of teen pregnancy, school dropout, delinquency, and work absenteeism.
• James Heckman questioned whether self-control could be the key.
• If self-control is malleable, it can affect health, wealth, parenting, and crime rates.
• Enhancing self-control may reduce social problems.

Skepticism About Self-Control

• Many scientists believed self-control problems are outgrown
• Some believed self-control isn't as influential as IQ or social class.
• Some viewed self-control as unchangeable
• Others thought self-control was only relevant in ADHD cases.
• Childhood self-control strongly predicts adult success, regardless of intelligence or socioeconomic status according to a 40-year study of 1,000 children.

The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study

• A 40-year health and behavior investigation of over 1,000 individuals born in Dunedin, New Zealand (April 1972-March 1973)
• Began as an obstetric survey and evolved into a long-term study of behavior and psychology.
• Assessments were conducted at birth and ages 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 21, 26, and 32
• 95% of the 1,007 surviving members (now 38-year-old adults) participated in the most recent assessment (2011-2012)
• Participants undergo extensive tests, examinations, and interviews about their health, wealth, and behavior.
• The study design allows analysis of correlations and behavioral patterns.
• Participants with low self-control have not dropped out, enabling a full range of life experiences to be explored.
• The study addresses whether self-control at preschool age predicts adult outcomes.
• The study addresses if children with low self-control are more likely to smoke, drop out, or become teen parents.
• Childhood self-control consistently predicts later health, wealth, criminality, and parenting.
• The study examines what self-control has to do with happiness.
• Self-control was assessed via observational ratings, questionnaires from teachers, parent interviews, and child interviews.
• Ratings were combined into a reliable composite self-control measure.
• Girls had higher self-control than boys on average.
• High family social class and good intelligence influence children's adult life success.
• Statistical controls were introduced to test for childhood self-control independently predicting health, wealth, parenting style, and crime, regardless of social class and IQ.

Health and Wealth in Dunedin

• Adult health problems were examined as early warning signs for diseases and premature mortality.
• Dunedin children underwent physical examinations and laboratory tests in their thirties to assess obesity, hypertension, lung damage, periodontal disease, high cholesterol, sexually transmitted infections, and systemic inflammation.
• These clinical measures were summed into a physical health index.
• 43% had none of the clinical biomarkers while 20% had two or more.
• Childhood self-control predicted the number of adult health problems
• Adults with poor childhood self-control reported elevated risk of dependence on a greater number of substances
• Informants confirmed the longitudinal link between self-control and substance dependence: As adults, children with poor self-control were more likely to be rated by informants as having alcohol and drug problems
• Unfavorable outcomes in wealth (low income, poor saving habits, credit problems, and welfare dependence) were examined
• Childhood self-control foreshadowed situations in their 30s.
• Those with poor childhood self-control were less likely to have saved money
• They had acquired fewer financial building blocks for the future (home ownership, investment funds, or retirement plans)
• Those with poor self-control struggled financially in adulthood with money management and credit problems
• Informants verified the link between self-control and financial problems
• Self-control ratings in childhood foretold the participants' official credit ratings in adulthood.
• Those with the lowest self-control were most likely to be rated as undesirable credit risks as adults.
• Self-control ratings weakly predicted who received government benefits, but those with the poorest self-control stayed on benefits longer.
• Benefit recipients in the highest self-control quintile used benefits for less than 18 months
• Benefit recipients in the lowest self-control quintile used benefits for more than six years.
• Children with lower self-control grew up to be adults with more financial difficulties.

Crime and Parenting

• Crime prevention, control, criminal courts, and incarceration account for 10% of the U.S. gross domestic product.
• One quarter of the Study members had been convicted of a crime by their thirties (comparable to conviction rates in other developed nations).
• Children with poor self-control were more likely to have been convicted of a criminal offense.
• Among the 5% of the cohort who had spent time incarcerated, more than 80% came from the cohort's two lowest quintiles of childhood self-control.
• Those observed predicted effects of self-control for the study participants and also assessed their children.
• 75% of the 1,037 members were parents by 2012.
• Family psychologists rated videos on aspects of parenting.
• Those who as children had poor self-control grew up to be the least skilled parents of their own children.
• Childhood self-control strongly predicted whether these members' offspring were in a two-parent or a one-parent household.
• One-parent households were more likely for adults that had low self-control as children.
• One generation's low self-control causes disadvantages to the next generation.
• Those with weaker self-control had worse health, less wealth, less skilled parenting, and more crime as adults than those with stronger self-control.
• After removing children in the least and most self-controlled quintiles, the observed correlation remained robust, indicating that the findings did not depend on an extreme group.
• Removing the 61 members who were diagnosed with ADHD did not alter gradient associations.
• Teaching self-control skills would benefit intelligent children, those from affluent homes, and those who score above average on self-control.

Origins of Trouble

• Ratings of selfcontrol were extracted for when the children were 3-5 years old in the mid-1970s.
• The brief observation of preschoolers' self-control significantly predicted outcomes in the fourth decade of life
• Children with poor self-control were more likely to begin smoking by age 15, leave secondary school early with no educational qualifications, and become unplanned teenaged parents.
• The the more snares teens encountered, the more likely they were to have poor outcomes as adults.
• Helping teens avoid snares could improve population health, but building self-control skills before the teen years is also warranted.
• In the Dunedin Study, statistical controls consistently reveal that self-control has an independent effect on life outcomes.

Twin Comparisons

• The Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study (E-risk) is a British birth cohort of 2,232 twin siblings tracked since birth (1994-1995) with 96% retention.
• Twins do not have identical levels of self-control, but they do grow up in the same family, which provided the opportunity to ask whether the sibling in each twin pair who had lower self-control later developed worse outcomes.
• This isolates the influence of self-control by comparing siblings and disentangling the individual child's self-control from all other features on which families differ.
• Self-control differences were analyzed within same-sex fraternal twin pairs.
• At age five, the E-Risk twins were rated on the measure of self-control used with the Dunedin children.
• At age 12, the 5-year-old sibling with poorer self-control was significantly more likely to begin smoking, perform poorly in school, and engage in antisocial conduct (stealing and fighting).
• The twin with lower self-control was rated by teachers as requiring more of their effort in the classroom.
• Children depleted teachers' energy for teaching other pupils.

Reengineering the Self

• Individual differences in childhood self-control have key social effects.
• They predict multiple indicators of health, wealth, parenting, and crime across three decades of life, in both sexes.
• The E-risk Study helped disentangle the effects of children's self-control from the effects of variation in their social class and home lives.
• High self-control protected Dunedin Study members from suicide.
• 22% of participants in the bottom fifth of self-control scores attempted or died by suicide by age 38, but only 7% in the top fifth of childhood self-control scorers made a suicide attempt.
• Innovative policies that put self-control center stage could reduce costs related to health care, crime control, social welfare, and education.
• One of the highest costs of self-control may be the poor start it creates for successive generations.
• Differences in self-control between children predict their adult outcomes approximately as well as low intelligence and low social class origins.
• Those with the highest and lowest childhood self-control were at opposite ends of the spectrum in adult outcomes.
• Those in the top fifth of childhood self-control scores only had had 10% make below the poverty line, as opposed to the 32% of adults who as children had scored in the bottom fifth on self-control measures.
• The top fifth exhibited crime-conviction rates of 13% as opposed to 43% for the bottom fifth.
• Self-control can change, and members' self-control scores were only about half as stable as their IQ test scores.
• Working as a supervisor responsible for subordinate employees improved some members' self-control rank.
• Better outcomes are possible and suggests universal interventions (programs benefit everyone, avoid stigmatizing anyone, and therefore attract widespread citizen support).
• Martial arts, music lessons, and computer games can improve self-control in young children.
• Programs for school classrooms are based on the notion of "plan, do, then review."
• Some programs target parents coaching them on how to raise their child's self-control quotient.
• The challenge remains to improve these programs and scale them up for universal dissemination with a good cost-benefit ratio.
• Interventions should be scheduled during both early childhood and adolescence.
• Interventions that prevent mistakes and early childhood intervention could prevent teens from making such mistakes in the first place.
• Enhancing selfcontrol in early childhood will likely bring a greater return on investment than waiting until adolescence.
• Adults can exercise and strengthen self-control
• Self-control can also be depleted when they are stressed, intoxicated, or fatigued.
• The crime-reduction policy called "target hardening" discourages would-be offenders by making law-breaking so onerous that it loses its easy-money appeal.
• A default automatic payroll-deduction retirement savings scheme requires no effort
• Nations resort to passing coercive laws to enforce self-control, such as banning smoking in public places and making motorcycle helmets, seatbelts, and infant car seats obligatory.

Maturing and Reproducing Studies

• The Dunedin and E-risk studies are long-term projects that will continue to improve our understanding of self-control.
• New themes of research includes the interplay of genes and environment.
• Researchers plan to study variation in the structure of Study members' brains, as well as direct fMRI studies of how their brains process threat, reward, memories, and the executive functions of self-control.
• Investigations of members' experiences of menopause, memory loss, grandparenting, and eventually retirement are planned.
• Globally, the human population is trending toward fewer children and more elderly people.
• These historic demographic changes are driving up the value of individual self-control.
• Both cohorts (born in different countries and different decades) strongly support that improving individual self-control will prove essential for humanity's long-term health, wealth, safety, and happiness.

What Is Self-Control?

• Self-control bridges concepts and measurements from different scientific disciplines.
• Health researchers report that self-control predicts early mortality, psychiatric disorders, and unhealthy behaviors.
• Sociologists find that low self-control predicts unemployment
• Criminologists name self-control as a central causal variable in crime theory.
• Neuroscientists study self-control as an executive function carried out in the brain's frontal cortex
• MRI studies have identified the brain structures and systems that are activated when research subjects exert self-control.
• E-risk Twin Study showed that genetically identical twins are more similar in self-control at age 5 than are fraternal twins.
• Developmental psychologists are uncovering how young children learn self-control skills.
• Factors that relate to self-control include: emotional lability, proctivity for flying off the handle, low frustration tolerance, lacking persistence, short attention span, distractibility, shifting from activity to activity, restlessness, being overactive, poor impulse control, acting before thinking, difficulty waiting, and difficulty in turn-taking