David M. Callahan, Ph.D.
Providing Psychological Services to
Cape Cod and Southeastern Massachusetts
Using Training Modules for
Frustration Tolerance and Delay of Gratification
Many children who struggle with their behavior have fundamental difficulty with two very specific coping skills: frustration tolerance and delay of gratification. While many children learn these skills naturally through the progress of their lives, for some children the ability to develop these skills in a naturally-occurring way seems to be less developed. Unfortunately, when these skills go undeveloped, significant behavioral problems and emotional problems often accrue, as lack of these fundamental coping skills creates multiple forms of conflict and difficulty for children and the adults who are entrusted with their care.
We see these behaviors occurring in younger children. In many ways, children who cannot delay gratification alienate their peers and frustrate their teachers and parents because of their demanding behaviors. These are the children who have to be first in line at school, have tremendous difficulty playing cooperatively and who have tremendous difficulty tolerating being told “no.” Often, adults attempt to intervene with these behaviors after they emerge, resulting in conflicts, arguments and tension that can escalate into significant behavioral difficulties on the part of the children or, at times, loss of control on the part of adults. These can be very high intensity, chaotic situations. Problems with frustration tolerance are similar. Children who are struggling with a task become emotionally overwhelmed, begin to shut down and lash out angrily. Frustration tends to trigger an impulse in which individuals act aggressively towards the perceived source of their frustration. These are the children who tear up their homework, smash their toys or throw the controls for their video games across the room. These outbursts are often dramatic and intense, resulting in adults needing to intervene to stop the behavior, which often only serves to escalate the intensity of the child’s emotions. Frustration is a very challenging emotion to learn to contain and control.
Unfortunately, in each of these situations, a child’s ability to learn through discipline is often fairly minimal when they are in the throes of these episodes. The intensity of emotions associated with these behaviors results in high levels of brain cortisol, which makes it much more difficult for children to learn and integrate new material. In essence, they are too distraught to learn effectively. That is why, when we attempt to instruct children in those moments, they often resort to angry reactivity rather than cooperation. These are the children who will deny that they have engaged in any problematic behaviors, blame the adults and say unkind and hurtful things, as they are driven by strong emotions that override their ability to think in a rational fashion.
Because of this reality, it is often most effective to attempt to train these skills in situations in which a child is calm and more able to learn. These are skills that can be taught, but they need to be built in a gradual fashion, as they require both change in behavior and regulation of emotion, each of which is challenging, particularly in younger children or children whose emotional regulation is challenged already. I believe that the best way to do this is to work in simple “training modules.”
This approach can be used for both delay of gratification and frustration tolerance. The goal of these interventions is to try to break down those coping skills into their fundamental components, and gradually build those skills over time. As much as possible, trying to break these skills into concrete, sequential steps that a child can learn is encouraged. Maintaining a simple and gradual approach that includes a tremendous amount of praise and reinforcement for successful use of those skills is typically the best way to build new behaviors. Remember, very little is learned with punishment; typically, all punishment does is terminate the behavior that we find undesirable. To build a behavior, praise, support and a sense of legitimate caring is often far more effective.
The fundamental beginning skill for delay of gratification is simply for a child to learn to wait. Often children who struggle with this skill will tell you that they have to have things right away or that they can’t wait at all. This skill can be challenged in very simple and molecular ways. For example, a child who is shouting that he wants a toy can be taught, when calm, how to simply wait. For example, in a non-intense situation, a somewhat neutral object that is not particularly desirable is offered to a child, with the understanding that he or she will receive it only if she waits patiently for 5 seconds. This is typically fairly easy for a child to manage. After that initial training, extending the time to longer periods while still using a neutral object helps to build the skill of inhibiting behaviors such as asking constantly, grabbing for objects or engaging in demanding behaviors. Once a reasonable interval is achieved without difficulty, introducing a slightly more desirable object becomes part of the training. Moving from some neutral object, such as a pencil, to a slightly more desirable object, such as a coloring book, to a toy that the child is eagerly awaiting can be very powerful. The end point of this progression is to have a child be capable of waiting an undetermined and indefinite amount of time to receive an object that he or she wants very badly. The key here is to continue to praise the waiting behavior, provide messages of confidence that you believe the child can in fact engage in the behavior successfully, and to be absolutely reliable in your response; that is the formula that is most likely to prove successful. Once a child has mastered that capacity to wait, under those structured circumstances, the caregiver can then negotiate a signal that the adult can use when the child in a situation which utilizing this waiting skill is needed in a real-life, conflictual situation. Most often, the best cues are nonverbal. In a real situation, providing some type of nonverbal cue that reminds a child that this is a situation in which he or she must wait can serve as a powerful trigger for a child to initiate those behavioral sequences that have been trained in a formal way. Mastery of those skills in structured situations gives a child a template of how to behave in situation which has more emotional intensity for him or her. The fundamental learning of coping skills can be quite transformative for children who have lacked those skills, as the lack of those skills often is a source of a tremendous amount of discomfort and dysphoria for the child as well.
Frustration tolerance can be taught in a similar way. The core skill to learn to tolerate frustration is to accept the word “no.” For many children, “no” is an immediate trigger of reactivity and anger, fueling dramatic behaviors that are often intense and difficult to manage. The same basic process for teaching acceptance of the word “no” is applied as for learning to wait. The child is first told to ask for something they do not want. When the child accepts the refusal, he or she is praised for that and reminded that they can in fact accept “no” at times. Gradually building to increasingly more desired objects is encouraged. Imbedded within that is learning to ask only once, and to accept the refusal without reaction. This is a fairly easy skill to master when things are calm. Again, with sufficient training, this can be then transitioned into real life situations, again with a negotiated nonverbal cue to let a child know that this is one of those situations.
Obviously, training these skills takes some time and effort. While this can be labor intensive, like most important skills, time invested in the beginning pays off in dividends at the other end. The amount of effort and energy expended on children who have difficulty tolerating frustration and delaying gratification is far more labor intensive than the amount of effort that it takes to train these skills. An ounce of intervention is often very much worth a pound of cure, if this can be done proactively and with a child’s cooperation.
Children who have learned these skills often feel much better about their lives. This increases their ability to tolerate stress and often improves their social relationships as well. While in some ways these are very simple concepts, they are quite central to the basic happiness and contentment of human beings. Learning to bolster these skills. rather than simply punishing children who lack them, can be quite potent in improving the outlook and behavior of children over the long-term.
