The marshmallow test became one of psychology's most durable stories because it offered a simple explanation for why some children succeed. Put a treat in front of a four-year-old, promise a second if they wait and watch self-control reveal itself. The children who held out appeared to possess a trait that would carry them through school and life.

Today's reading list asks what happens when the marshmallow hires a product team.

The Atlantic reports many games on Roblox use the same variable-reward loops found in slot machines and sports-betting apps. Roblox does not design these games; independent developers do, and the author of the piece argues the platform's revenue-sharing model can encourage them to build around trading, random chance and repeat purchases. Roblox says it prohibits actual and simulated gambling, has expanded age checks and parental controls, and notes that 1.4 percent of its 132 million daily users make purchases.

The concern runs well past one platform. More than 1,300 school districts have filed complaints arguing that products like Instagram and YouTube are making school learning environments worse for students. European regulators reached preliminary findings this month that personalized recommendations, autoplay and infinite scroll on Facebook and Instagram contribute to compulsive use. Meta disputes those findings and points to the protections it has added for teenagers.

Cellphones bring all of those competing demands on attention into a child's pocket. UCLA researchers found that elementary students who owned phones had poorer reading-comprehension scores than those who did not. Whether children brought the phones to school made no difference. Ownership itself was correlated with lower performance.

So adults have responded by taking the marshmallow away. Pew finds that 77 percent of U.S. adults support in-class cellphone bans for middle and high schoolers and, for the first time, more support than oppose bans lasting the entire school day.

Not everyone thinks taking away the phone teaches students to manage it. In The 74, the founders of Commons, which developed an alternative to pouches, offer an "airplane mode for schools" that blocks distracting apps while students keep their devices, arguing that guardrails preserve opportunities to develop self-control.

The original experiment never locked the treat away. It stayed on the table while the child sat with it. A bell-to-bell ban governs only the hours a child spends at school, and the products waiting at home are built to deliver the next reward before a child decides whether they want it.

We keep testing whether children have enough self-control when the more revealing test may be what adults, developers and companies do with the power to capture their attention.

Jay Caspian Kang warns against turning every change in young people's behavior into a story of generational decline. The kids may be kind of all right. The systems we built around them are another matter.

Looking for your next opportunity in education? W/A Jobs features 3,500+ career opportunities from 300+ organizations across the education industry.