Kindergarten Behavior Predicts Adult Earning Power
July 16, 2019
By: Lillian Mongeau
Source: The Hechinger Report
As grown-ups everywhere have long suspected, poorly behaved 6-year-olds will come to no good. Or, at least not as much good as their more attentive, kinder and less aggressive peers. New research used tax return data to determine the income, at age 33 to 35, of 2,850 children tracked by the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Kindergarten Children, an academic research project following kids from kindergarten through adulthood. The analysis, led by first author Francis Vergunst at the Université de Montréal, found that children who were bad at paying attention as 6-year-olds earned less than their peers as adults. The study also found that boys, but not girls, who were aggressive or who scored low on measures of “prosocial” behavior in kindergarten also earned less than their peers as adults. These findings held even when economic status and IQ were taken into account. The study was published online in the journal JAMA Psychiatry in June 2019.
There is substantial existing research on the power of self-control demonstrated at an early age to predict later success, said Daniel Nagin, a co-author and professor of public policy and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But little has been done to pull apart the specific traits that are usually measured to determine a child’s level of self-control, he said. He also thinks this study is the first to connect behavior data to tax return data, rather than relying on self-reported income.