self-control

I have visited some of the newer supposedly "effective" schools, where children shout slogans in order to learn self-control or must stand behind their desk when they can' t sit still .

If you spend much time with educators and policy makers, you' ll hear a lot of the following words: "standards," "results," "skills," "self-control," "accountability" and so on.

But good self-control can be set to run in families in that children who have good self-control are more likely to grow up to be healthy and prosperous parents.

But the good news is that, Moffitt says, self-control can be taught by parents, and through school curricula that have been proved to be effective.

Changing your beliefs about the nature of your self-control can have positive effects on character development.

Even the children who had above average self-control as pre-schoolers could have benefited from more self-control training.

From a very early age, some children exhibit better self-control than others.

Moffitt said it's still unclear why some children have better self-control than others, though she says other researchers have found that it's mostly a learned behavior, with relatively little genetic influence.

Now, a new study that began with about 1,000 children in New Zealand has tracked how a child's low self-control can predict poor health, money troubles and even a criminal record in their adult years.

So it looks as though self-control is something that in one generation can disadvantage the next generation.

So, children with minor self-control problems were likely as adults to have minor health problems, and so on.

Some of their earliest observations have to do with the level of self-control the youngsters displayed.

Speaking from New Zealand via Skype, Moffitt explained that self-control problems were widely observed, and weren't just a feature of a small group of misbehaving kids.

Terrie Moffitt of Duke University and her research colleagues found that kids with self-control issues tended to grow up to become adults with a far more troubling set of issues to deal with.

Terrie Moffitt's paper on "The link Between Childhood Self-control and Adult Status Decades Later" is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The children who had the lowest self-control when they were age three to ten, later on had the most health problems in their thirties, and they had the worst financial situation.

When an exhausted student goes to school, he risks hurting everyone on the road with his impaired driving; he doesn't have the cognitive resources to do well on his English test; he has lower self-control with his friends; and at home, he is moody with hi