Instant gratification

Brian Gannon

How pushy and impatient are we with pushy and impatient kids?

You know how kids from deprived backgrounds are so often short on patience? They see something they want – and they want it now! They display a sort of anxious, grabbing urgency, afraid that they will miss out on something, scared that they will have to go without.

It's not so hard to understand. In the animal world, food, warmth and mating are some of the dominant drives which have to be satisfied before there is time left over to lie in the sun or to play. Indeed, so urgent are these drives that, when frustrated, animals will attack and kill to satisfy them. A hungry cheetah is not going to be polite in order to spare the feelings of its parents, let alone a passing buck. “I'm hungry now (or soon will be) and I'm not going to let this chance pass."

Survival instinct
Tame animals in the zoo and domestic animals at home lose some of these urgent and dramatic traits (not all of them, of course) as they come to anticipate that they will be fed regularly by their owners/keepers. Wild animals, or those who have not been looked after, remain alert, decisive and opportunistic when it comes to meeting their basic and important drives and needs.

We know this is true with unsocialised and deprived children. Most of us work with these children day by day. When their lives have been difficult and they have not been looked after, for the sake of their own survival they have had to remain pushy, assertive and determined.

To those whose needs have been adequately met, the behaviour of deprived children often seems infantile, impolite, ugly and aggressive. They plead and demand, they are impatient and always at the head of a line for anything being handed out – and above all, they can't wait: they become anxious when made to wait. What they want, they want NOW. They seek what we call “instant gratification."

... and us?
But this feature is not really about the children – it's about us. Do we child care workers recognise ourselves in these descriptions of the “instant grats brats" – just a teensy weensy similarity in our own inability to wait, our tendency to make immediate demands on youngsters and to expect instant responses? How often do we say to children “You will do this at once. I am not going to wait. I want this cleaned up now!" I'm not sure why we do that – it probably has to do with the timetable, but it can also have something to do with our sense of authority, our demand for respect and obedience. Or we are anxious that, when things don't quite go our way, we are losing control. Or we're tired and less than creative at the end of a day or a shift.

The easy way?
But there is a worse way in which we child care workers often seek instant gratification. It is when we expect performance and compliance from a youngster who has never had the chance to learn how. It is when we believe that we can correct a lifetime of deprivation and wrong learning by simply demanding good behaviour. It is when we say to a 15-year-old for whom life has always been harsh and denying: “I am going to give you one chance to prove yourself. If you screw up, you're our of here!"

Do we really believe that a child who has lived with deprivation, with hunger and the threat of hunger, with negative or destructive role-models (or no role-models at all) “do we really believe such a child can satisfy our expectations of good behaviour on demand? “You behave yourself!" we hear ourselves saying, “Stop doing that! Be patient (polite, industrious, successful ...)"

A fifth grade teacher has no right to expect a pupil to do long division problems in math if these have never been taught. The teacher cannot simply demand performance. Maybe the sixth grade teacher can expect the pupil to do these problems “but even then, if the pupil doesn't succeed the teacher will have to ask two questions: “How well has the pupil learned this?" and “How well have I taught this?"

But there is no quick way to success. There can be no instant gratification. Just as we expect children to develop patience and to be able to wait for things, so we as child care workers or directors or social workers must know how to wait “and what we must do together with the child in the mean time to reach our goals.