A small group of children with what researchers call “poor brain health” ended up accounting for a huge portion of social costs as adults, according to a new study from New Zealand.
The idea of whether the events of childhood can predict or explain future events has gained traction in recent years thanks to the popularization of the Adverse Childhood Experiences study and other work that links lifelong health outcomes to experiences early in life.
But researchers at Duke University and the University of Otago in New Zealand suggest that the role of childhood experiences in poor outcomes later in life may still be underestimated.
In a study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, researchers drew on data collected from the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, work that has tracked more than a thousand Kiwis born in 1972 and 1973 over the course of 38 years.
They hoped to determine whether “economically burdensome outcomes” that some adults faced later in life — such as likelihood of receiving welfare benefits, fatherless families or involvement with the criminal-justice system — could be predicted as a result of early childhood risk factors.
[For more of this story, written by Jeremy Loudenback, go to https://chronicleofsocialchang...sts-study-says/23649]
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