From Childhood to the Later Years: Pathways of Human Development

Are family experiences early in life related to patterns of adjustment and functioning in later life? This study builds on past research with the decades-spanning Terman sample of talented children to explore this basic question. Multinomial logistic models identified three family experiences in childhood and adolescence—socio-economic status of the family of origin, early parental divorce, parent-child attachment—that predicted membership in holistic profiles of aging in the later years, as generated by cluster analysis of five social psychological factors. These associations from early to later life reflected both mediational pathways (adult experiences and current circumstances explained the observed influence of early experiences) and supplemental pathways (the significance of experiences in each stage were independent of each other).