Examining the Associations of Educational Experiences and Mental Health from Childhood to Early Adulthood

• In Event: Academic Achievement: What Matters? Insights from Longitudinal, Multi-Cohort, Genetically-Informative Investigations

Abstract

Educating children is one of the most expensive governmental interventions, costing around 6% of gross domestic product. Importantly, educational achievement is crucial to children as early school achievement and exam performance pushes children to different lifelong educational and occupational trajectories, with exam grades used for making decisions about further education and employment. However, little is known about the effects of this high-stakes educational achievement on children’s wellbeing and mental health. The statistics of mental health problems in the UK portrays a dark picture: 1 in 10 children have diagnosable mental health disorders - approximately three children in every classroom. Childline, a free counselling service for children in the UK, reported that children's top concern is stress and anxiety related to schoolwork and exam performance. These mental health problems may have a long shadow later in life for children. They also affect children's families and society as a whole, with the cost of mental health problems in the UK being estimated at £100 billion per year. In addition, anxiety and stress during childhood are associated with self-harm and suicide. However, links between school experiences and mental health problems remains a grossly under-investigated research area. In this project, we used both twin/family and DNA methods to examine the etiology and causal directions of the associations between educational experiences and developmental psychopathology.
This study is drawn from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) sample, a longitudinal study of twins born in England and Wales between 1994 and 1996. The families in TEDS are representative of the British population in their socio-economic distribution, ethnicity and parental occupation. Ten thousand families are still actively involved with the TEDS study over twenty years from the first data collection wave. The present study includes data collected in TEDS across multiple waves. Specifically, we analyzed data collected over five collection waves, when the twins were around 7, 9, 12, 16 and 21 years old, to : 1) Clarify the phenotypic associations between educational experiences and developmental psychopathology across adolescence and emerging adulthood; 2) Use statistical genetic techniques to investigate the genetic etiology and causal directions of the associations between educational experiences and developmental psychopathology across adolescence and emerging adulthood. Epidemiological analyses will be applied to study the associations between educational experiences and mental health. Family relatedness in the study will enable the associations between early school-related experiences and mental health (general psychopathology, anxiety and depression) to be analyzed while controlling for genetic analyses using generalized linear mixed-effects models. The preliminary analyses revealed significant associations between school experiences and mental health (average correlation ~ .10-.15), about half of these correlations were explained by genetic factors. Moreover, we show that these educational experiences (homework, disruptive classroom, peer problems) act cumulatively, that is they predict more variance in the mental health problems when combined (correlations ~.25-.30). These results will have far-reaching implications for clinicians and educationalists, including an impetus to develop intervention programs that increase educational achievement while reducing mental health problems.

Authors

• Kaili Rimfeld, King’s College London
  Presenting Author

• Margherita Malanchini, Queen Mary University of London
  Non-Presenting Author

• Andrea Giuseppe Allegrini, King's College London
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cathryn Lewis, King's College London
  Non-Presenting Author

• Robert Plomin, King's College London
  Non-Presenting Author