How can cookies help teach our children (and us) to save money?
Since 1969 children have been transfixed by the larger than life puppetry on Sesame Street, which is now the most decorated children’s show of all time. The Cookie Monster is one of the show’s most famous characters, world renowned for his insatiable appetite for sweet treats. However, recently the big blue monster has learnt to restrain himself. The reasons behind why could shed valuable light on our own, grown up behaviours.
BThe Marshmallow study by Walter Mischel has become famous for showing some incredibly cute children as well as being the catalyst for a growing field of self-regulation. Those children who are able to resist the temptation to eat the marshmallow the longest have been found to predict better academic achievement, less behavioural problems and social outcomes as teenagers and even greater income in adulthood.
What’s great about self-regulation is that it isn’t predetermined by genes and that anyone can learn to do it well. In light of this, the cookie monster has now been featured displaying multiple self-regulatory tactics in a number of episodes to complete his ultimate goal of joining a club and to pass a test directly based from Walter Mischel’s original Marshmallow task.
But how did this affect the children? Linebarger and Gatewood conducted an experimental analysis of the episodes and found that one single viewing of an episode helped children delay eating a treat four minutes longer than their unexposed counterparts. So what can we learn from the cookie monster to help us with our money? Quite simply a little self-regulation can go a long way! When participants were taught financial self-regulatory strategies, it resulted in more than quadrupling of savings rates, from 8% to 38% of income. And this was without any rise in income, just spending less and saving more through self-regulation.
No matter our age, whether it be for a cookie or our money, we can all learn to keep our hands out of the cookie jar!
Oaten, M., & Cheng, K. (2004). Longitudinal gains in self-control. Poster session presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Austin, TX.
Kotler, J. A., Truglio, R. T., & Betancourt, J. (2016). How Sesame Street Meets the Changing Needs of Children in the United States. The Sesame Effect: The Global Impact of the Longest Street in the World. Linebarger, D. & Gatewood, R. (2014) Lessons from the Cookie Monster, Poster presentation at the London international conference on Education, London, UK. (A full paper is expected in 2016)
Linebarger, D. & Gatewood, R. (2014) Lessons from the Cookie Monster, Poster presentation at the London international conference on Education, London, UK. (A full paper is expected in 2016)
Mischel, W., Ayduk, O., Berman, M. G., Casey, B. J., Gotlib, I. H., Jonides, J., ... & Shoda, Y. (2010). ‘Willpower’over the life span: decomposing self-regulation. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
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Koval, C. Z., vanDellen, M. R., Fitzsimons, G. M., & Ranby, K. W. (2015). The burden of responsibility: Interpersonal costs of high self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(5), 750.
