Career success could be predicted as early as kindy.

A 20-year-study from Pennsylvania State University and Duke University tracked more than 700 children from across the US between kindergarten and age 25 and found a significant link between their social skills as kindergartners and their success as adults two decades later.

The researchers found socially competent children who could cooperate with their peers without prompting, be helpful to others and were compassionate problem solvers were far more likely to earn a college degree and have a full-time job by age 25 than those who struggled socially.

They also studied participants’ association with crime, drug abuse, public assistance, and mental health issues.

“This study shows that helping children develop social and emotional skills is one of the most important things we can do to prepare them for a healthy future,” said Kristin Schubert, program director at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded the research, in a release. “From an early age, these skills can determine whether a child goes to college or prison, and whether they end up employed or addicted.”

Expectations parents set for their children have a huge effect on execution.

University of California, Los Angeles professor Neal Halfon and his colleagues studied data from a national survey of 6,600 children born in 2001 and found parents who saw college in their child’s future managed to steer their child towards that goal.

Okay, don’t shoot the messenger but according to research out of Harvard Business School which tracked 50,000 adults in 24 developed countries, there are significant benefits for children growing up with mothers who work outside the home – specifically girls.

According to a paper by Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Kathleen McGinn and her team “women whose mums worked outside the home are more likely to have jobs themselves, are more likely to hold supervisory responsibility at those jobs, and earn higher wages than women whose mothers stayed home full time.”

According to research the gap between rich and poor is getting bigger.

Stanford University researcher Sean Reardon says the achievement gap between high and low-income families ‘is roughly 30 to 40 per cent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born 25 years earlier.’

A 2014 study lead by University of Michigan psychologist Sandra Tang tracked over 14,000 children from 1998 to 2007 and found that mothers who finished high school or university were more likely to raise kids that did the same.

Apparently learning maths early can turn into a massive advantage later on in life.

A study of 35,000 preschoolers across the US, Canada, and England found that found that a knowledge of numbers, number order, and other rudimentary maths concepts can not only predict future maths achievement as well as reading achievement.

Author and Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck asserts that people view success in one of two ways and Brain Picking’s has summed them up like this:

A ‘fixed mindset’ assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can’t change in any meaningful way, and success is the affirmation of that inherent intelligence, an assessment of how those givens measure up against an equally fixed standard; striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled.

A ‘growth mindset,’ on the other hand, thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of un-intelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities.

In summary if kids are told they did well on an exam because they are inherently smart the will cultivate a “fixed” mindset but if they are told they can succeed due to effort that teaches a “growth” mindset.

Text: The Australian Women’s Weekly