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Research Eases Fear About Troubled Children

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The New York Times

Published: November 13, 2007

Educators and psychologists have long feared that children entering school with behavior problems were doomed to fall behind in the upper grades, but two new studies suggest those fears are exaggerated.

One concluded that kindergartners who are identified as troubled do as well academically as their peers in elementary school. The other found that children with attention deficit disorders suffer mainly from a delay in brain development, not a deficit or flaw.

Experts say the findings of the two studies, being published today in separate journals, could change the way scientists, teachers and parents understand and manage children who are disruptive or emotionally withdrawn in the early years of school.

In one study, 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 success at the end of elementary school. It was published in the journal Developmental Psychology
In the other study, researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health and McGill University, using imaging techniques, found brains of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder developed normally but more slowly in some areas than brains of children without the disorder.

Doctors said that the report, being published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, helps explain why so many children grow out of the diagnosis in middle school or later, often after taking stimulant medications to improve concentration in earlier grades.

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