There were two unanswered questions: The first is, ‘Does the quality of care that one receives in early life affect childhood, but does it also have long-term predictive effects for functioning into adulthood?’.

Lee Raby

Categorized in : Health

That’s the glass-half-empty way of looking at it, the reverse is also true: Individuals who received the most care were doing on average better on the academic tests and were more likely to go to college and graduate, and sometimes get postgraduate degrees.

This is not the first time that we, the field, has observed that this early sensitivity effect is more associated with academic than social performance, but much of the theory that is driving this area of research would anticipate the reverse of that, it creates questions.

Mental health is also important, and then a new direction of the study is going to the origins of physical health problems. We know that stress is not good for health, and that stress early in life in the form of not-optimal parent-child relationship may have these kinds of long-term effects on biological health. Those are all unanswered questions.