NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Researchers for the first time have linked toddler behavior with the development of specific psychiatric problems 18 years later.
Their report in the November issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry says impressions of three-year-olds as either "inhibited" or "undercontrolled" were associated with anxiety, depression, suicide, alcoholism, antisocial personality, and criminal behavior at age 21.
"It seemed that the connections pretty much made common sense," says Dr. Terrie E. Moffitt, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. "It was the children who were the most inhibited at age three -- inhibited, fearful, withdrawn, shy -- who were the ones later at age 21 who were the most likely to have had a major depressive episode in the past year. Whereas, the children that were undercontrolled at age three -- a little hyper, a little aggressive or naughty -- those later had problems with antisocial behavior."
Moffitt says no prior study (on the subject) has stretched across this length of time, through childhood "The findings are very modest in size, but it's extraordinary that they are there at all," said Moffitt.
She points out that the study came about almost by accident. During a long-term, health and development study begun in Dunedin, New Zealand, in the 1970s, examiners had been asked to rate the behavior of the three-year-olds whose intelligence and motor skills they had tested for over 90 minutes. These ratings, she says, had been set aside, unused, until Moffitt and her Wisconsin colleague, Dr. Avshalom Caspi, found them.
The researchers then compared these observations with police and mental health records 18 years later, impressions of the subjects made by their best friends, and psychiatric interviews with the subjects who were now 21 years old.
"All these sources of information correlated quite well," Moffitt says. "If the best friends said, 'My friend appears to have a drinking problem,' those tended to be the people who were undercontrolled as three-year-olds," Moffit says.
"A lot of the continuity that we're seeing here has not arisen because of something set in stone already by age three," Moffitt asserts.
"I would say a child who has, say, an undercontrolled style at age three will be more difficult, more challenging to parents. A lot of research shows that children who are like that wear their parents down over time so that, by the time they get to school age, the parents have given up trying to control the child. And then they wear down their teachers," she says.
"Also, children like that receive more negative feedback from parents. They get punished more often, have difficulties making friends, and then the whole thing takes on a snowball effect for some of these children over time."
SOURCE: Archives of General Psychiatry (1996;53:1033-1039)
