I’ve come to realize, I spent a large portion of my childhood waiting. Waiting seemed to be ingrained in every activity in the 80’s and early 90’s. Watching movies is a great example. If we missed a movie, we had to wait months for it to come out on video cassette. Then we’d have to drive to the video store, and find it on the shelves. Sometimes the video was rented, and we’d have to reserve it for next time, 2-3 days later.

We waited to get the newspaper on Sunday. We waited for our monthly magazines to be delivered. We waited 6-8 weeks for mail-ordered items to come from catalogs. We waited for postcards and letters to arrive. We all waited to use the single phone in our house. We all waited our turns to watch TV on the single set we had. We waited 7-10 days for pictures to be developed, after vacations. We waited at the park to meet our friends, because no one had phones. We waited for our parents to come pick us up after school and sports. 

When we waited, we didn’t have much else to do but talk. We socialized with anyone nearby.

Today, we rarely wait. Movies stream instantly, all over the planet, in multiple languages. A never-ending stream of emails fill inboxes, and people text each other at all hours of the day. News and celebrity events are live streamed to our phones. Each day, untold millions of pictures and videos are instantaneously shared. Amazon delivers in 24 hours. UberEats, ZocDoc, you name it. Everything is available all the time. 

Now, in the rare moments we wait, we don’t talk to people. We have the entire internet at our fingertips to scroll Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok. We play video games. We keep our faces glued to our screen to stave off any chance of boredom. 

This constant access to entertainment is not good for our children. Learning to wait is a key component of developing patience, something our children are sorely lacking these days. Patience is one of the most important skills to have, and the hardest to learn. And in the few moments they wait, they rarely choose to socialize.

Research has shown for years that children who are more patient have much better outcomes in life. The Stanford Marshmallow Test famously showed that children with more patience do better in life. In the experiment, children were given a marshmallow, and told they had two choices: eat the marshmallow right away, or don’t eat it and wait. If they waited, they would be rewarded with another marshmallow. The original study results indicated that children who waited for the second marshmallow had a huge range of better life outcomes, from educational attainment to health. 

Another famous test looked at patience and academics across cultures. Students were given a difficult math task, and researchers recorded how long students worked on the problem before giving up. Not surprisingly, Americans gave up quickly, in about 30 seconds. Japanese students, on the other hand, worked for almost an hour. While correlation is not causation, it’s worthwhile to note that Japanese students outperform Americans on every single measure of mathematics.

Unfortunately, when we introduce instantaneous technology to the lives of our children, we are fostering the exact opposite. Smartphones are perhaps the biggest perpetrators of these crimes. More and more evidence is emerging that smartphones are damaging our children’s attention spans, and reducing their ability to sustain patience. Nor are these accidents: App developers are well-aware of the dopamine addiction that comes from instant gratification, and they specifically design their products to bring greater addiction.

How do we combat these trends?

The first and most obvious answer is to get our kids off phones. Specifically get them off apps and social media, which are designed for addiction. Easier said than done. The second way, which I encourage you to do, is practice patience with your children. This has several benefits above and beyond just restricting your child’s phone usage.

For starters, young children are more likely to do something they see adults modeling. Practice what you preach. There are a wealth of side benefits. Learning chess, for example, is a great way for a child to learn patience, and yet also engage in a mentally tasking activity, and also be social with another person. If chess isn’t your sort of thing, there are plenty of sports that also fill the role. Golf is an amazing way of learning patience, as many can attest, and also gets you outside and with friends.

Do you kids a favor (and yourself) and take a break from the instantaneous miracles of modernity. Your children will be better for it, and you might just have a good time.