Lewis Terman began the first long-term study of intelligence quotient (IQ) in 1921. He followed 1,500 students for decades. He succeeded in showing that children with a high IQ were not sickly or social misfits. (Yay!)

He was surprised to learn, however, that IQ is not perfectly correlated with achievement. On average, individuals with a higher IQ do have a higher income later in life, but many highly intelligent individuals do not perform better than average, and many with a lower IQ outperform more intelligent individuals. IQ is one factor, but there are other factors that may do a better job at predicting success.

Self-discipline and Grit

Walter Mischel discovered in the 1980s that a 4 year old's ability to delay gratification was a good predictor of academic achievement 10 years later. In the now famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, Mischel gave children a marshmallow or other small treat. He told children that they would receive a second treat if they waited for fifteen minutes without eating the first treat. The ability to delay gratification as a 4 year-old was correlated with future academic success, social success, lower body mass index, and even higher SAT scores.

Another study looked at multiple measures of self-discipline in a group of eighth graders. The study found the self-discipline rating for each student to be highly predictive of final GPA, whereas IQ was only slightly correlated. The effect was seen on both ends of the spectrum. Measuring in the lowest quartile for self-discipline hurt students' GPA more than being in the lowest quartile for intelligence. Similarly, being in the highest quartile for self-discipline improved GPA more than being in the highest quartile for intelligence.

There are certainly other traits correlated with achievement, but if you need to focus on just one, self-discipline might be a great place to start.

Steps You Can Take

Practice Tolerating Emotional Discomfort

Working hard when one would rather be playing video games or watching TV can be emotionally uncomfortable. This is especially true if your children have not experienced much boredom or frustration in their lives. If children rush to video games or TV the second they are bored, they may not have developed the inner ability to handle this emotional discomfort. One way to help children cultivate this ability may be to offer 15 minutes of a reward after seeing sustained hard work for an hour. The specifics of your situation will vary based on the age and maturity of your child. You may need to start with shorter time frames and then work up to longer stints.

Give Your Children Long-Term Rewards

Foregoing immediate gratification can be encouraged by setting up long-term rewards that encourage our children to aim daily for a goal that may be weeks or months away. You might even start small with your own version of the marshmallow test. Over time, you can stretch the gratification to hours, overnight, or even a few weeks.

Remove Temptations

Our son was in a Catch-22 situation. He had to be on the computer to do his homeschool work, but the presence of YouTube and online video games meant he got none finished. He would not or could not resist the temptation. The parental controls on his computer now resemble the security at Fort Knox. He complains constantly, and he still gets up and wanders aimlessly around the house at times, but he does get more done than he did before the controls were in place. Our hope is that the habits he develops without the extra distractions will help him to be more self-disciplined once he has access to them in the future.