further to

Several quotes from a recent study.
(http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1245.pdf)

«If policy-makers care about well-being, they need a recursive model of
how adult life-satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting
both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. [...] The
most powerful childhood predictor of adult life-satisfaction is the
child's emotional health. Next comes the child's conduct. The least
powerful predictor is the child's intellectual development. This has
obvious implications for educational policy. Among adult circumstances,
family income accounts for only 0.5% of the variance of
life-satisfaction. Mental and physical health are much more important.»

«The second strand of work so far has used cohort data to explore the
distal influence of childhood and adolescence upon adult
well-being. [...] Such an approach could lead to an excessive focus on
childhood and adolescence as determinants of well-being, with little
role left for policies relating to adult life. [...] In this first
attempt at such a combined "path model", we take adult life-satisfaction
as the measure of a successful life. This is determined partly by
"adult outcomes", and partly by family background and childhood
development. But these "adult outcomes" also have to be explained
themselves – and childhood development may be crucial to this. Our
family background in turn profoundly influences development in
childhood.»

«How far can we predict adult life-satisfaction at different earlier
points in a person's life? So how far does the child "reveal" the adult?
Or can we all be remade in adulthood?»

«[W]hen to intervene – earlier or later. If childhood well-being
matters as much as adult well-being, then the main issue on the benefit
side is how long the effects last. For language learning for example
the answer here is clear (it lasts longer if the intervention is
earlier). But for emotional learning there is still much to be
discovered. On the cost side adult interventions generally produce
immediate flow backs to public finance as more people go out to work and
earn. Child interventions can produce massive savings to public
finances but these are often quite delayed. Clearly we need
interventions at all ages and the optimum balance will remain unclear
until we have better life-course models.»

«The model we develop is a recursive path model in which
life-satisfaction at each age can in principle depend on everything that
happened before that.»

«Policy-makers need models which show them the impact of all the main
factors affecting adult life-satisfaction, in a consistent framework
using the same metric.»