There is no consensus on how families and primary-grade teachers should be preparing children for success in secondary school and beyond. Literacy and numeracy skills are the focus of early grade curricula but often not priorities for child care centers, which tend to stress the development of behavior skills like getting along with peers and responding appropriately to adults. Neuroscience has fueled interest in the importance of so-called ?executive function? (self-regulation and attention) skills. Given time and resource constraints, we need to ensure that parents and school curricula promote the most important skills and behaviors. We propose to assess to what extent achievement, behavior and attention skills in middle childhood are predictive of adult labor market and health, and of avoiding serious adult crime.
Data are drawn from six population-based developmental data sets (the Swedish Study of Individual Development and Adaptation, the Finnish Jyvaskyla longitudinal Study of Personality and Social Development, the British Cohort Study-1970 birth cohort and the British National Child Development Survey-1958 birth cohort, the U.S. Baltimore Beginning School Study, and the U.S. Columbia County Study) all of which measure a broad set of skills and behaviors between ages 7 and 10 and adolescence, and follow their samples of children into middle adulthood (in our data sets, at least age 27 and, in one case, as late as age 50). We use these data sets to: i) describe cross-country differences in age 7-10 skills and behaviors and age 27-50 outcomes by various measures of parental socioeconomic status; estimate associations between middle-childhood skills and adult labor market, crime, relationship and health outcomes for each of our samples and identify social-class differences in these associations; iii) assess the relative role of adolescent vs. middle childhood skill and behavior measures in molding adult outcomes; and iv) in the case of middle childhood skills and adult health, estimate to what extent teen health risk behaviors account for the links. By seeking convergent findings across populations and countries, our project complements the other four in the program project by showing which skills and childhood stages targeted by the various education-related interventions we evaluate matter most for adult well-being.