Hey guys, I’m back!
This week I finished working through my evaluation and curriculum updates. Thankfully, with EFNEP’s more developed evaluation, I was able to use it as a template to work on the Parenting Education Program’s evaluation as well. With more of my work being literature review, I was mainly spending my time this week, looking through the textbooks and articles again. One interesting article I read was called “Cultures Crossing: The Power of Habit in Delaying Gratification” by Yuko Munakata. Her research studied delayed gratification across Japanese and U.S. cultures based on the marshmallow task. If you haven’t heard of the marshmallow study, it’s a study that tested children’s ability to control their impulses to consume a marshmallow in front of them. An experimenter first puts one marshmallow in front of the child, informing them that if they do not eat it until the experimenter returns they will receive another marshmallow as a reward. In this context, they found that Japanese children were inclined to wait for a second marshmallow because of the daily habits ingrained in them from their culture. From a young age, Japanese children are taught that it is only right to eat when every family member sits at the table, whereas children in the U.S. are not trained with this daily habit. With this discovery, they wanted to see whether they were more disciplined in different contexts as well such as gift-giving. She discovered that in the context of unwrapping gifts, U.S. children were more inclined to wait. This makes sense since culturally, children in the U.S. are taught to wait for every person to be present during Christmas or birthday parties. Delayed gratification remains crucial for children, helping them overcome impulses to enjoy instantaneous rewards to instead attain later benefits and predicting academic success, socioemotional competence, and health. She concluded that delayed gratification is promoted by the strength of the habit of waiting for rewards accumulated in an everyday context. Isn’t this quite fascinating? I hope you enjoyed learning about this as much as I did. If you would like the full article I will link it at the bottom of this blog!
Besides reading different studies such as Yuko Munakata’s paper, I am starting to ponder different ways to possibly collaborate with EFNEP to promote spatial language in the kitchen and dinner table. Moreover, we hope to expand the curriculum and communicate with individuals from Suffolk County. On Tuesday, I plan to do some interviews involving the article, so come back again to hear some updates!