In 1985, a group of kindergarten teachers in Quebec got together at the end of the school year and filled out a series of detailed questionnaires about their students.
They rated the five- and six-year-olds’ behaviour on a three-point scale on measures of attentiveness (Does this child have their head in the clouds all the time? Are they easily distracted?); hyperactivity (Is this kid a fidgeter? Are they always moving?); opposition and aggression (Do they refuse to share? Do they bite?); and anxiety (Do they worry about everything and cry all the time?). There were also questions about children’s “prosociality,” or, in layman’s terms, their ability to be good. The teachers reported whether kids intervened to break up fights, comforted children who were sad, or invited classmates who looked lonely to join in a game.
Now, researchers at the University of Montreal have pulled 2,850 of those kids’ tax returns to try to figure out if their incomes from age 33 to 35 had any relationship with what they were like back in the days of daily nap times. The authors expected that kids who spent their school years pestering their classmates and ignoring their teachers would underperform in school and subsequently in the workplace.
And they were right: Even after accounting for IQ and some basic demographic and family information, they found that being a handful in kindergarten is a small, but significant risk factor for having a lower income as an adult.
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