Using Another Simple Game To Predict Success for your Four Year Old

Several weeks ago, I blogged about a simple experiment from the 1960s that you can run on your four-year-old and that researchers believe is a reasonable predictor of future success.  The USA Today on September 2 published a story about another neat, little game you can play with your four-year-old that is supposed to be another reliable indicator of success in early schooling.  It is called Heads-Toes-Knees-Shoulders. It is a lot like Simon Says but with a twist. According to research papers, those kids who excel in this game also will likely excel academically in pre-school and kindergarten in math, vocabulary, and literacy.

It goes like this: you call out “touch your head” your child is supposed to touch their feet, and vice versa.  When you call out “touch your knees” your child touches his shoulders, and on like that.  The point of the game is to test your son or daughter’s ability to self-regulate and control their impulses.

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Want to Know if Your Child Be a Success? All You Need is Two Pieces of Licorice and 5 Minutes.

The May 18, 2009 issue of New Yorker ran a fascinating article about an experiment that child psychologists in the 1960s use to test the ability of four year olds to exert self control.  The psychologist who designed the experiment later expanded it into a longitudinal study and realized that the ability to show self control at 4 is actually a fair predictor of future success in life (here’s the link to the NY’er article)

This ingenious experiment is easy to run on your own child, and takes only about 5-10 minutes.

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