In some ways, it only seems like poor judgment from the standpoint of someone who is not poor. My wife and I have worked with distressed families through our church, and one of the things that we observed is that, for their children, there is so much uncertainty in life that they have nothing to lose if a gamble comes up craps.

So what if an action might put their family on the street? They experience evictions and homelessness regularly. They may as well take a chance on something that will bring them something good, because the disastrous consequences of failure are things that happen as a regular feature of their lives.

In addition, their parents often make promises or projections of better things in the future. These promises may be sincere projections and hopes, or they might be total fabrications in order to induce particular behavior. In the end, though, the promises usually come to nothing. A child who has lived with this all their lives might hear the researcher telling them that if they do not touch the marshmallow they will get two later on, but what they know in their heart is that later on there will be no marshmallows. Even the one that they left on the dish might be taken away from them. That is the way life works.

The lives of the poor are very different from the lives of developmental researchers. And the assumptions made by researchers when designing these experiments and interpreting the data maybe entirely inappropriate indie life of a child growing up in poverty.