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A sample of 35 children has now been followed from birth to the completion of kindergarten. All of these children come from intact upper-middle-class professional families with a mean maternal education of 16 years and a mean paternal education of 17 years. Twenty of the children (the high-risk group) were born with medical complications (such as preterm birth or illness) that necessitated a mean of 19 days in intensive medical care. The remaining 15 children (the low-risk group) were born at term and without medical complications. Although the development of these two groups of children differed in a number of ways during the first year of life, no further differences were observed until kindergarten. During kindergarten, however, the high-risk group began to reveal significant delays (relative to the low-risk group) in performance IQ and academic achievement.

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