Shanker – educational outcomes

There’s a high correlation between mental and physical problems – that a child that has the one is likely to have the other at different points in their lifespan, and so as you go around the wheel you’ll see that you’ve now gone from psychology into classical health- so we’re looking at the health crises that we’re dealing with as a society until we get to 11 o’clock, and 11 o’clock is educational outcomes. While now we’ve got just so much research that’s come out since 2000 shown that self-regulation is absolutely fundamental, critical to how well kids are going to do in school  

Why are we seeing this incredible concordance, this incredible correlation between poor educational outcomes and problems from 1-5 or 6-11? Is it because they’re stupid? Is it because they have a low IQ? Is it because they’re just not smart enough to understand what kinds of things they should do to enjoy health? No. it’s because a common pathway has been impaired. This core pathway in the brain, if it is over-worked in the early years of life, if the child is responding to too many stressors, so that he’s constantly putting his foot on the break, constantly activating the parasympathetic nervous system, there will be a cost, and the cost is going to be the child’s well-being, and the cost is going to manifest in any of the problems you see on that graph, and probably in several.