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Risk-taking behaviour is essential to human life. However, risk-taking behaviour can also compromise healthy development when the costs of risk-taking outweigh its benefits. Think of behavioural problems in childhood, or – later in development - criminal behaviour, delinquency, drug abuse and health-and societal compromising behaviours that have been associated with risk-taking behaviour. Research describing the development of risk-taking behaviour is mainly focused on adolescents and less is known about the development of risk-taking behaviour in elementary schoolchildren. Therefore, we aim to get a better understanding of the development of risk-taking behaviour in childhood. The two overarching research questions in the present thesis are: 1. What is the normative development of risk-taking behaviour in mainstream elementary schoolchildren and (how) are individual differences in risk-taking development associated with externalizing and/or internalizing symptoms? 2. What is the association between adverse social experiences and the development of risk-taking behaviour and subsequent development of maladaptive behaviour? To answer our research questions two different study samples are used. The first sample came from a larger longitudinal project, “Happy Children, Happy Adolescents?”, among Dutch elementary schoolchildren on their behavioural, social-emotional, cognitive and bio-psychological development during the elementary school and the role of interactions with peers and teachers in this development. The second sample came from a longitudinal multigenerational study, “Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children”, on how physical and social environments interact over time with genetic inheritance to affect health, behaviour and development in infancy, childhood, adolescence and then into adulthood. Participants in this project were all from Bristol, UK and surrounding areas. Both datasets include repeated behavioural measures related to risk-taking (risk-taking propensity and sensation-seeking) and information on the social environment of the children (peer victimization, childhood maltreatment and social classroom norms). Jointly, the datasets covered the child and adolescent period from ages 7 – 19 years. Overall, the findings of the present thesis implicate that increases in risk-taking behaviour during the elementary school period is normative in both boys and girls and as such, is nothing to worry about. However, attention should be payed to individual differences and to those who show deviations (both heightened and lowered) in levels and development of risk-taking behaviour during the elementary school period. As, in our studies, heightened risk-taking behaviour is related to the development of externalizing problems and lowered risk-taking behaviour to the development of symptoms of anxiety. Our results imply that even more vigilance on deviating risk-taking behaviour is warranted when children have experiences of victimization. Our results show that experiences of victimization may be related to DNA methylation profiles that have been associated with high sensation-seeking behaviour and in turn with the development of delinquent behaviour in later life. In addition, our results showed that victimized children tend to show norm-defying levels of risk-taking behaviour in their classroom. As such, being victimized may set the stage for a deviating developmental course of risk-taking development that in turn may increase the risk for further development of both internalizing and externalizing problems later in life.