The study also showed that a combination of factors, including neurobehavioral symptom severity, walking
ability, and verbal fluency at one year after injury, was highly
predictive of
poor outcomes five years later.
The first 5 years of life are critical for the development of language and cognitive skills.1 By kindergarten entry, steep social gradients in reading and math
ability, with successively
poorer outcomes for children in families of lower social class, are already apparent.2 — 4 Early cognitive
ability is, in turn,
predictive of later school performance, educational attainment, and health in adulthood5 — 7 and may serve as a marker for the quality of early brain development and a mechanism for the transmission of future health inequalities.8 Early life represents a time period of most equality and yet, beginning with in utero conditions and extending through early childhood, a wide range of socially stratified risk and protective factors may begin to place children on different trajectories of cognitive development.9, 10
Adults noted the
ability of children with callous / unemotional traits to manage and regulate their emotions, while
poor emotion regulation was more
predictive of the cluster of externalizing problems.