The Risk of Childhood Risk-Taking: The development of risk-taking behaviour in children and how it is shaped by the social environment

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-ta