New Study Claims That You Can Know How Much Will A Person Earn When They Are In Kindergarten

Inattentive? Aggressive? Defiant? Does that fit your kindergarten kid? Then they will likely not be making tons of money in the future.

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What predestines a person to be capable of handling challenging professions and being successful in them and thus making a lot of money? Psychologists are searching for the answer to this question for quite some time now. Several times in the past it has seemed they may have found the answer but in the end, they were wrong.

As an example, the famous marshmallow test: In this test psychologists offered kids a marshmallow and told them that if they don't eat it in the next fifteen minutes they will get another. But if they ate it, they will not get any more. This ability to delay gratification seemed like a great pointer towards life success.

And it seemed to be true, kids who had a stronger will had better school results got to better positions at work and made money. At the same time, it was easier to keep healthy body weight, they suffered from fewer civilization diseases, were less likely to get addicted and less likely to get into financial trouble. It seems great, doesn't it? But the problem was that the same study used children from both socially strong and weak groups. And children from poor families can't really see a point in delaying gratification as in their case, who knows if there will a marshmallow in a minute. When you have a chance – you should use it. On the other hand, children from wealthier families never felt that kind of pressure and thus were more capable of delaying gratification. In their mind, another sweet will come so why the rush. Thus, the differences weren't coming from the ability to delay gratification but from their social background and partially from their intelligence levels – which is more inherited.

Now, a new study from the Université de Montreal published in the JAMA Psychiatry journal gives us another option to test children and their potential chances for success in life. Let us take a look at it.

Scientists took more than three thousand preschool kids and included them in the study. In six years they gathered a large amount of information about them and then they followed their life journey over a time period longer than 30 years. But instead of searching for the successful ones, they searched for test results that predict a problematic future.

In an ideal case, children who test “badly” should be the target of programs that provide them with skills, knowledge, and habits that increase their chances to pass through life without any problems. The scientists tried to find pointers that can be easily found in preschool ages. And they used teachers in preschools towards that goal.

The teachers rated the children’s ability to keep their attention if they were hyperactive, aggressive, defiant, anxious or their ability to work selflessly for the collective good. Their success in life was measured in their earnings which were recorded in tax forms.

For both the boys and the girls a bad indicator was a low ability to focus. For boys, being aggressive and defiant was also an indicator of lower future earnings. On the other hand, being able to work for the common good was an indicator of better earnings.

The results aren't really that big of a surprise. But as most studies, it didn't answer all the questions. Like, why do boys' future prospects have different rules than girls' future prospects? And one important thing needs to be said. These are just trends. They work out in large numbers but they aren't necessarily true for individuals.

Sources:

• https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2736346

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