New studies cast light on early behavior problems

Educators and psychologists have long feared that children entering school with behavior problems were doomed to fall behind in the upper grades, writes Benedict Carey in The New York Times. But two new studies suggest that those fears are exaggerated.

In one study, being reported in the journal Developmental Psychology, an international team of researchers analyzed measures of social and intellectual development from more than 16,000 children and found that disruptive or antisocial behaviors in kindergarten did not correlate with academic results at the end of elementary school.

In the other study, being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that the brains of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder developed normally but more slowly in some areas than the brains of children without the disorder.

For further information, read the full article.