"Right", "soon", "tomorrow": In children, the most inconspicuous words are sometimes enough to trigger a little family drama. Regardless of whether it is about visiting the zoo, the bedtime story or that mom should definitely take a look at the self -painted picture: If children want something, it has to happen immediately - now!
There are several reasons why patience is not yet a virtue in them. For example, they do not yet have a mature understanding of time. Does half an hour take more than 15 minutes? Why do 5 minutes sometimes feel short when it's time to go to bed afterwards, and sometimes it feels eternal when grandma and grandpa only come to visit in 5 minutes? When is "the same" and why do you have to wait so incredibly long until Christmas? Such and similar questions simply puzzle the youngest.
In general, children are presence -oriented and lived in the here and now, explains Marc Wittmann from the Institute for Border Territories of Psychology and Psychohygiene in Freiburg. »What we as adults have to learn in meditation courses can still be found. This has to do with the fact that your future perspective is not yet so pronounced, «says the psychologist, who has been researching time perception for years. "Future is so abstract that children cannot construct them."
It is only at primary school age that girls and boys develop the ability to think ahead. Jean Piaget (1896-1980), who is considered a pioneer of cognitive developmental psychology, calls this the stage of concrete operations. It begins at the age of about seven years. The actions of the children – and thus also their thinking - become more and more abstract from this point on. It is true that it has now come to the realization that children are capable of competent thinking much earlier than Piaget had assumed. For example, by the age of about four, you are already developing the ability to empathize with other people and adopt their perspective. On the other hand, they do not yet possess an abstract imagination, which forms the basis for an understanding of time, in the first years of life.
Emotional self -regulation takes time
Time is therefore not tangible, especially for young children. Terms like "after" and "later" have no meaning for her. In addition, patience is not innate. If they are put off until a later date, this therefore causes frustration, anger and incomprehension in the youngest.
Small children cannot consciously control this reaction, says Birgit Elsner, head of the developmental psychology department at the University of Potsdam. “If a small child has a need, this must be satisfied quickly, otherwise it has negative feelings. And that is what we call impatience. ”In order to weaken the negative feelings that are accompanied by the confined, to calm down on their own, the ability to make emotional self -regulation is required. But it has to develop first, explains the expert. This often takes over the entire childhood and youth. Only in young adulthood is the prefrontal cortex fully mature, which is located on the front of the brain and plays a central role in action planning and impulse control. Studies indicate that the more the prefrontal cortex is to wait for positive things to wait for children - a core area in the foregray that is related to motivational processes and also houses parts of the neural reward system.
Before that, children are therefore dependent on outside help to curb their impatience. The younger you are, the more this applies. "At around six months, children often discover their first opportunities to regulate themselves," explains Birgit Elsner. This ability is then increasingly improved - if the parents help. "Even babies learn, when their parents talk to them calmly and caress them, that things like this can help them to calm down," says Elsner.
In kindergarten age, many boys and girls have already learned behaviors to channel their own feelings and also cope with shorter waiting times. They may sometimes be annoying for adults, for example when the child at the bus stop suddenly begins to sing loudly or jump around. In fact, children use such strategies to distract themselves and regulate negative emotions. For example, they bridge the period until the bus finally arrives with grandma and grandpa.
Some children are just more impatient than others
It has not yet been finally clarified whether children who are particularly patient and can regulate their feelings are also more successful later than adults. At the end of the 1960s, personality psychologist Walter Mischel carried out his famous marshmallow test. In addition, Mischel and his team offered four- to six-year-old children a candy. They had the choice of eating or waiting immediately and later receiving a second marshmallow. Years after the attempt, the group examined the children again and found that those subjects who had already had a good impulse control at a young age were later more successful at school than the participants who could not wait. They also had a higher social skills. Since then, a lot has been discussed about the meaningfulness of the marshmallow test. However, he is still a good example to show how different children behave when it comes to waiting.
The fact that some children are more impatient than others is also related to personality. "The temperament is already pronounced in babies," says Birgit Elsner. While some infants are surprisingly good at dealing with themselves, others become restless after just a few seconds and cannot be calmed down so quickly. "The ability to regulate emotions probably also has an innate component," Elsner concludes.
But other factors also play a role. For example, studies show that girls are a little more patient than boys on average. However, the difference is low and depending on the study design, it falls a little larger, sometimes a little smaller. In addition, cultural factors have an impact on the situations in which children can master themselves better or worse. Scientists around Kaichi Yanaoka from the University of Tokyo put the patience of children from Japan and the USA in 2022 in two different ways: once the little ones should resist a delicious candy, once a gift for certain time. Children from Japan were more patient when it was necessary to wait for the food than for the present, with participants from the USA it was exactly the other way around. The authors suspect that this is related to different customs. So it is more common in Japan to wait for food, for example until everyone took a seat in peace and thanked the cook for the dishes, while in the United States that children do not fall directly through gifts.
Routines make waiting easier
So how do parents deal with the best when the little ones get angry quickly, and how do they support their children to develop patience? Routines have a beneficial effect from the start. In this way, children get to know their daily routine and know exactly what action follows the next. From the age of six months, toddlers recognize a pattern in time processes: if the parents get spoons and bowl out of the closet, there is a little later porridge. If the curtains are drawn, there is bedtime a little later. Such structures give recent security and make it easier for you.
The older children become, the more they want to shape the daily routine according to their imagination. At the latest in the autonomy phase at about two years of age, sooner or later they realize that their own desires do not always coincide with those of adults. And even at kindergarten age, many find it difficult to regulate their own feelings when something does not work out the way they would like. If restlessness, crying or screaming are the result, parents should definitely take these emotional outbursts seriously, advises Elsner. Scolding, dismissing the emotions of the little ones as unnecessary or even ignoring them is counterproductive, explains the expert. Because the negative feelings are only further intensified by this, the excited child then finds it even more difficult to regulate his emotions.
Instead, it is important to respond to the child, to recognize his emotions and to make it easier for him to wait. You should tell the child that you understand your feelings and look for a solution together. Questions such as "What do you think, how we can shorten the waiting time?", The situation can calm down as well as specific suggestions for bridging the waiting time. Even with babies it helps to explain individual actions: "First I take the bowl, then I stir your porridge and then you can eat." In this way, parents support their children in recognizing structures and thus promoting the patience of the Youngest.
For toddlers from about two years old, things like an Advent calendar can help to make longer periods comprehensible: every day in December, the child is allowed to open a door until Christmas Eve is finally on December 24th. In this way, not only the waiting time is sweetened, children also learn at the same time that anticipation is something nice and waiting can be associated with positive experiences. Before the birthday, parents can resort to a similar trick and have the little ones paint a balloon on a picture about every day.
When it comes to shorter periods, parents should make as concrete statements as possible. "Tomorrow we drive to grandma and grandpa" is often an abstract sentence for three -year -olds. "Sleep again, then we drive to grandma and grandpa" is more vivid. And instead of "I'm ready right away and then we'll do it", parents could rather say: "If I have cleared the dishwasher to the end, we are tinkering." Also reading a book or other actions help children bridge waiting times and with positive To fill experiences. So the little ones learn step by step, as you can wait.
