The other night I needed cumin. Dinner was half made and rather than substitute something or simply leave it out, I opened an app and ordered it. One jar. It arrived in eleven minutes, brought up by a man on a motorbike who had battled actual Dubai traffic so that I could season a tray of potatoes I could have seasoned perfectly well with something already in my cupboard.
I stood there holding the cumin and felt, for one slightly horrifying second, exactly how mad this is. Then I put it on the potatoes and got on with my evening, because this is the life I have built. And as horrified as I am writing this and saying it out loud, I am not planning to give it up.
This is the thing nobody says when we talk about raising patient children. We talk about screen time and dopamine and the terrible thing the internet is doing to their attention spans. We hold all of it slightly away from ourselves, as though we are the calm grown-ups managing a child's problem rather than two people in the same boat. I am not managing my children's instant gratification from some serene outside place. I am in it. I am possibly worse than them. They at least still believe a thing might take time. I have felt impatient because a forty-minute delivery was, to quote my own internal monologue, taking ages.
We are the first generation of parents trying to teach a skill we are actively unlearning ourselves. I want my children to sit with boredom, to wait for things, to understand that the gap between wanting and having is where most of the interesting parts of being a person happen. Meanwhile I am modelling, all day, a life in which that gap has been engineered down to the time it takes a scooter to cross Jumeirah.
Here is the part that changed how I think about it. There is a famous old experiment called the marshmallow test. A small child is put alone in a room with one marshmallow in front of her and told that if she can resist eating it until the researcher comes back, she will get two. The children who managed to wait were said to grow into more successful adults, and for decades this was held up as proof that willpower was something you either had or did not. The trouble is, it has been quietly falling apart for years. When researchers ran it again with a bigger more varied group of children, the link between waiting at age four and doing well later was about half what the original claimed. Most of it dissolved once they accounted for the child's home and background. The waiting was never really about willpower. It was about trust. Children waited less when the adult had already shown themselves to be unreliable. They waited longer when they had reason to believe the promise would be kept.
I find that freeing. I also find it more demanding, because it takes patience off my children as a trait they either have or lack and puts it back on the world we build around them. A child learns to wait when waiting reliably pays off. When the people around them do what they say. When the environment is steady enough that holding out feels like a reasonable bet rather than a sucker's game. A child whose world feels unpredictable is not being impatient when they grab the thing in front of them. They are being rational.
So the real question is not how I get my kids to be more patient, it is whether I am building a home that makes patience make sense, in a city doing everything in its power to make it pointless.
The things that help are smaller and far less satisfying than a hack. Letting them be bored without rushing to fill it, even when the boredom is loud and aimed at me. Not narrating my own impatience out loud, which I do constantly and which they absorb like sponges. Keeping my promises about time, so that "in five minutes" means five minutes rather than the elastic ever-receding five minutes I usually offer.
I would love to tell you I have started ordering less on my phone. I have not. I checked WhatsApp four times writing this, because there is a Year 3 thread about whether Thursday is recorder day or not. What I have done is stop pretending I am outside the problem. Not raising patient children in a patient world, because that world is gone. Raising them in this one.
With love,
Roshni
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