How 'Quality Day Care' Leads to Higher Incomes

Researchers studied almost 1,000 kindergartners, and looked at how much money they made 30 years later.

This article is about one of the most interesting studies of how to raise successful kids I've ever seen--and I've seen a lot of them.

It's not without its flaws, and we'll get to them. But, the sheer length of the time involved in the data collection, and the fact that it relies on external and objective data--rather than what the kids involved reported themselves--makes its conclusions fascinating.

Writing in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, the researchers from the University of Montreal set out to learn "which disruptive behaviors in kindergarten are associated with employment earnings in adulthood for boys from low socioeconomic backgrounds."

They tracked nearly 1,000 boys over 30 years--correlating their teachers' assessments of their behavior in 1984, when they were 5 or 6, with their adult earnings decades later (which they obtained from their tax returns as 35 and 36-year-old adults).

What they discovered could have significant implications for the way parents -- especially parents o…