Your Childhood Coping Strategies Are Running Your Life

My kids are seven. Twins. And I say "in a minute" probably forty times a day.

In a minute when someone wants me to look at a drawing. In a minute when there's a question about whether sharks can smell blood from a mile away (they can, apparently, and we've confirmed this six times). In a minute when someone needs help with a shoe and I'm in the middle of a sentence or a thought or a completely imaginary version of being unbothered.

I don't track how often I actually follow through. I'm not sure I want to know.

So when I came across a recent episode of Mark Manson's Solved podcast — specifically the chapter on adaptations and behavioral change — and hit the marshmallow test section, I felt something shift in my chest. Not a revelation exactly. More like being caught.

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Here's the study, for the uninitiated: Walter Mischel ran a series of experiments at Stanford's Bing Nursery School in which preschoolers were offered a marshmallow and told they could have a second one if they waited twenty minutes alone with the first one. Follow-up research suggested the kids who waited grew up to have better grades, higher SAT scores, stronger relationships. The pop-science conclusion has been repeated ever since: delayed gratification is basically the key to everything, and some kids have it and some kids don't.

Except Mischel himself didn't believe that conclusion. He'd also run earlier, methodologically distinct work in Trinidad and Tobago — a separate study, not a replication — where the strongest predictor of whether a child waited for the second candy wasn't willpower or temperament. It was whether the child had a father in the home. Manson's co-host Drew lays out the follow-up research clearly: Celeste Kidd's 2013 study (published in Cognition) isolated the variable directly. She split children into a "reliable" condition — where an adult made a promise and kept it before the marshmallow test — and an "unreliable" condition, where the adult lied first. Nearly all the kids in the unreliable condition grabbed the marshmallow immediately. Nearly all the reliable-condition kids waited. No personality differences. No trait variation. Just: do I trust this person or not?

A larger study — Watts, Duncan, and Quan, published in Psychological Science in 2018, roughly 900 children — found that once you controlled for socioeconomic status, the marshmallow test's predictive power for later-life outcomes essentially disappeared. The kids from stable, high-trust environments waited. The kids from chaotic ones didn't. And the kids from chaotic ones, as Manson puts it, "were being rational." Why hold out for a promised reward when promises don't tend to hold?

Which brings me back to my "in a minute."

I'm not trying to be dramatic here — I know the difference between imperfect parenting and genuine instability. But there's something about reading this research as a parent of small children that doesn't let you stay in the comfortable observer seat. These kids aren't calculating trustworthiness. They're not running a conscious cost-benefit analysis. They're just absorbing a vibe — a pattern of: when this adult says something will happen, does it? That vibe goes somewhere. It becomes something.

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The broader framework Manson and Drew are working through is what they call the "layers of adaptation" — the idea that most of what we experience as personality is actually a stack of coping strategies we developed in response to our environments, usually before we had the language to name them.

The structure they lay out: at the base, you have actual personality traits — the relatively stable, heritable stuff, your Big Five fundamentals. Then on top of that, you develop behavioral habits, emotional patterns, belief systems, and finally identity narratives — all in response to what the world has thrown at you. The adaptation is usually smart, at the time. It's when the environment changes but the adaptation doesn't that things go sideways.

Manson uses his own drinking as the example: an introvert with a powerful drive for novelty and new experiences, who found that alcohol solved both problems elegantly — it quieted the social anxiety while amplifying the adventure. Worked great until it didn't. When he quit three and a half years ago, he discovered the adaptation had been load-bearing in ways he hadn't mapped. Things he thought he loved — fancy restaurants, concerts, parties — turned out he'd loved them with alcohol specifically. He replaced drinking with compulsive work, compulsive gaming, compulsive exercise. Different substance, same function.

I recognize that pattern. Not the drinking part specifically, but the substitution logic — the way removing one coping mechanism just reroutes the pressure somewhere else. I spent years in marketing using busyness the same way some people use a drink: as a way to feel useful when I was actually just avoiding the specific texture of being alone with my own thoughts. Then I became a stay-at-home dad and busyness became structurally unavailable in the same form, and I had to figure out what I'd actually been running from. That's not a fun afternoon.

The thing I brought from my own childhood into my kids' lives — without meaning to, without noticing — is a kind of reflexive self-sufficiency. My parents were good people and inconsistently present. So I learned early that needing things from people was risky, and that the safest version of yourself was the one who didn't need much. Reader, I have definitely passed some of this on. I watch one of my twins go very quiet when she's upset — just recalibrate, carry on, be fine — and I feel two things simultaneously: pride that she's resilient, and recognition that I know exactly where she learned it. That's a fun one to sit with.

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The part of Manson and Drew's conversation that stuck hardest is about the gap between insight and change. Drew spends a portion of the episode working through his own avoidant attachment in real time — he'd studied psychology, knew the research, could name his patterns precisely, and had even changed some of his behaviors around them. But he realizes on air that he'd addressed the behavioral surface without touching the emotional layer underneath. He'd learned to perform reciprocation in relationships without actually feeling safer doing it. He'd optimized the output without shifting the source code.

Manson's framing is useful here: "In many ways, insight is just one adaptation talking about another adaptation. Our ability to sit here and talk about our adaptations is just another adaptation."

I have read approximately one thousand parenting books. I could give you an annotated bibliography of attachment theory. I know what secure base behavior looks like. I know what "co-regulation" means. I said "in a minute" to my kid this morning while I was reading an article about being more present with your kids. The meta-irony was not lost on me, though I did briefly wonder if awareness of the irony counted as growth. (It does not. I checked.)

This is what the self-help industry almost never tells you, and what Manson is refreshingly direct about: understanding yourself and changing yourself are two completely different skills. The former can actually impede the latter — all that insight gives you something to organize and analyze instead of something to feel. You become very articulate about the knot without pulling any threads.

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The research framework Manson references toward the end is the Prochaska and DiClemente transtheoretical model — a description of how change actually unfolds in clinical settings. It maps out pre-contemplation, contemplation, action, and maintenance, and then — this is the part I genuinely love — it bakes in relapse as an expected stage, not a failure. You're going to slide back. That's in the model. The question is whether you climb out.

Drew asks Manson, near the end, how you're supposed to move past fear that's been structurally embedded since childhood. Manson's answer is the one worth keeping: "You're not going to get rid of a fear of abandonment... you don't get rid of emotions. You live despite the emotions. The trick is you need to find something that is worth wanting enough that you're willing to live with the fear despite it."

That's not the ending that sells you a system. It's not optimizable. What it looks like, for me, in the completely unglamorous day-to-day: it's putting the phone down when someone is trying to tell me something that doesn't feel urgent but is urgent to them. It's following through on "in a minute" even when the minute is inconvenient. It's showing up at the school thing exhausted and overstimulated because I'm what makes it feel safe to them, and they're absorbing the vibe whether I'm paying attention or not.

The marshmallow test isn't about self-discipline. It's about whether the adults around you showed up when they said they would.

So. In a minute. I mean now.

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Marcus Obi is a parenting and family writer at Buzzrag. He is a stay-at-home dad to 7-year-old twins and a former marketing manager. He writes about raising kids with honesty, humor, and a firm refusal of the perfect parent myth.