Are We Teaching Our Children to Be Impulsive?   Frank Barnhill M.D.
 

By now, I m sure you get the point.  Instead of being thankful that we don’t have to build a fire or heat an oven for thirty minutes to cook our pizza, we take the convenience of the three-minute microwave for granted.  If your child notices your impatience, he or she will assume it is normal to be impatient with the microwave.  If you become more and more impatient doing the same thing over and over, then you develop a tendency to be impulsive with that thing.  So, impatience can lead to impulsivity.  How you ask?  As we experience more and more convenient ways to get what we want when we want it, we tend to become more impatient with the convenience every time we use it.  It’s simple behavioral training, we get almost immediate gratification and that gives us the reward of pleasure and good feelings from the experience, which reinforces the behavior.  Therefore, we’re likely to repeat the behavior again in the future.  It’s sort of like training your dog to fetch the newspaper.  The more positive rewards occur when he successfully brings the paper, the faster he will do it in the future.  Now back to the main point.  Remember, kids learn by example and observation.  What are you teaching your children?  Well guess what?  We create impatience and train ourselves to be impulsive with several other things all day long.  Let’s take a look at a few. 

The TV remote control is probably the most common and oldest of the impulsivity training conveniences we have in our homes.  Surfing leads to impatience as we strive to increase immediate gratification from being able to skip commercials or follow several different shows at once.  How many times have you been upset because you couldn’t make commercial interruptions go away and instead changed channels to get more entertainment?  Did you buy a special recording system to delete commercials?  Do your children channel surf and fight over the remote?  It’s just possible they learned that from someone else in the family.  Maybe they’ll learn to preset channels and television shows at one click, so they can surf even faster.  Now let’s briefly look at other impulsivity training conveniences. 

Fast food and its immediate reward of eating is a strong impulse builder.  It’s difficult for some folks to sit at a table and wait for the waitress to bring the food, much less cook it. 

Cable TV and even faster digital methods of accessing entertainment cause some to want faster and more exciting input. 

Digital games, DVDs and video recorders provide instant access to the entertainment of our choice.  No longer do we have to wait in line for a movie or even leave the house.  You can have “Teenage Vampire Cult Slayers” downloaded to your computer or DVD and avoid that terrible social interaction that occurs when you leave the house.  Did you talk to your kids about this?  Most of their inter social skills in dealing with friends and those outside the family comes from being out of the house and experimenting with interacting with others.  The danger of the future is that we will train our children to become work at home on the Internet recluses. 

Pagers cause impatience and impulsivity as a result of the need to be in contact 24/7 and the rush to return the call.  Can you concentrate on what you’re doing and not rush to answer your page?  It’s hard to do that.  There’s always that nagging feeling of urgency if someone really needs to beep you.  Maybe it’s a real emergency.  What do you think they would have done if they couldn’t beep you? 

Cell phones are the almost pinnacle of impatience and impulsivity.  Hey if you have your cell phone handy, why not call the bank and discuss your checking account at this very minute?  Just because you’re driving your car doesn’t mean that you can’t focus on two things at once.  Right!  What if you’re angry at your bank and take your eyes off the road just one second to read that nasty notice of an overdrawn account.  I can imagine one day we will all have instant access computer chips embedded in our brain to communicate even faster.  You’ll have to watch those thoughts real closely. 

Wireless PDAs come the closest to the instant data stream we all crave and currently can access.  You can sit on the beach and conduct your business drinking your favorite poison.  I just don’t for the life of me see why anyone would want to mess up a good day on the beach by being accessible to a PDA.  Are we now training people that recreation must always include work?  If you let this one start a trend, then someone will sooner or later invent the mandatory work vacation.  .  Imagine, you get a two-week vacation at the beach with three days of away from the office work included at no charge. 

Hey, ATMs are another source of impulsivity behavior training.  I know friends who visit the ATM six times a week!  They just can’t wait in line in the bank or at the drive through.  Hey, that’s an idea!  Maybe all those people will decide to visit the ATM and I won’t have to stand in line inside the bank next time I go.  Or even better, maybe the drive through will be empty! 

With the advent of the Internet and computers, we have all fallen victim to getting information at the drop of the hat.  Does that mean we don’t need librarians any more?  Just think about those computer chips in the old brain.  And we expect our child not to be impatient, butt in or display other attributes of impulsivity?  Just think about what we’ve discussed today.  Do we really want to train our kids to be available 24/7, while being entertained, fed instantly, accessing the data stream, and working part time for a virtual company?  I trust the answer is no.  Well, by now you understand the dilemma and I’m sure you can figure out the solution.  You’ll find many more examples of impulsivity behavior training in real life.  Please share them with us at drhuggiebear. com. 

Dr. Frank

drhuggiebear, drhuggiebear.com and contained materials are the copyrighted and/or registered properties of Frank Barnhill, M.D. and may not be reproduced for profit without the express written permission of the author.  All materials may be photocopied in whole for educational use.  For information please contact us at drfrank@drhuggiebear.com.