[1] Guide To Self, Inc.

 A unique, new, longitudinal study found that there is a tremendous blow to the earning ability of adults who suffered from childhood psychological conditions such as depression and anxiety. What’s more, the study found that, upon becoming adults, such children have less chance of getting married, achieve less educationally, and earn roughly 20% less across the course of their lifetime. By adversely impacting their earning potential, the long-term financial consequences of childhood psychological disturbances exceeds $2.1 trillion dollars when summed across the lifetimes of all such U.S. citizens. The study comes out in the June 2010 issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine.

‘Childhood psychological disorders can cause significant long-lasting harm and can have far-reaching impact on individuals over their lifetimes,’ stated James P. Smith, the study’s head researcher and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. The study points out the tremendous benefit ‘of identifying and treating these problems early in life.’

The data comes from a massive study which tracked U.S. families for 40 years and found that childhood psychological disorders adversely impact some major indicators of success and happiness in life. The design of the study is unique in that siblings from the same family were tracked over time. Then, those siblings who had a childhood psychological disorder were compared to a sibling who did not have a psychological difficulty.

Siblings with depression, anxiety, rage, ADHD or a substance abuse disorder as a child earned $10,400 less per year on average as compared to siblings who did not have any such problem.

The study also reports that individuals who had childhood psychological difficulties had an 11% reduced chance of marrying than their siblings who did not report psychological problems.

An additional interesting finding is that those who had childhood psychological difficulties stopped their education a half year earlier than those who did not report such difficulties. The gap in education was even bigger for those who had drug or alcohol problems.

‘Not all of the people who have psychological problems during childhood will carry these problems into adulthood,’ stated Smith. ‘But they are 10 to 20 times more likely than others to have these shortfalls during adulthood. There clearly are large economic costs during adulthood caused by childhood psychological conditions.’

The ongoing study involves a nationally representative sample of over 35,000 people from roughly 5,000 U.S. families spanning the past 40 years. Approximately 6% of the participants stated they had some sort of psychological difficulty as a child. This is consistent with the percentage of children with a psychological disturbance across the United States. Roughly 4% of the participants reported suffering from childhood depression. Two percent stated they had substance abuse issues as a child. And another 2% reported having another psychological issue, such as anxiety or extreme anger. Some participants had coexisting disorders (e.g., depression and substance abuse issues).

The take home message here is the urgency of proper early intervention. For a thriving and productive life, psychological issues need to be identified and treated early in life.

About the Author

Dr. John Schinnerer is in private practice helping executives, adults, and teens learn anger management, stress management and the latest ways to deal with destructive negative emotions. He also helps clients discover satisfaction with life via positive psychology. His practice is located in Danville, California. He graduated summa cum laude from U.C. Berkeley with a Ph.D. in psychology. He is collaborating with the University of New Zealand on the International Wellbeing Study to look at what we do right and what make for a meaningful, thriving life. Dr. Schinnerer has been a speaker, executive and psychologist for over 10 years. Dr. John Schinnerer is Founder of [2] Guide To Self, a company that coaches clients to their potential using the latest in positive psychology. Dr. John Schinnerer hosted over 200 episodes of Guide To Self Radio, a prime time radio show, in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Dr. Schinnerer’s areas of expertise range from positive psychology, to emotional awareness, to moral development, to executive coaching core competencies. Dr. Schinnerer wrote the award-winning, “[3] Guide To Self: The Beginner’s Guide To Managing Emotion and Thought,” which is available at Amazon.com. His blog, [4] Shrunken Mind, was recently recognized as one of the top 3 in positive psychology on the web ([5] http://drjohnblog.guidetoself.com).