Using data from a Swedish longitudinal project, we predicted timing of marriage and parenthood and age-35 career success from mother-rated shyness in 8-10-year-old children. Results are compared with those previously found for Americans. Like shy American boys, shy Swedish boys married and became fathers later than nonshy boys. Unlike American boys, Swedish boys' adult careers were not affected by shyness. Like shy American girls, shy Swedish girls later married and became mothers at the same time as their peers. However, they also attained lower levels of education than nonshy girls. Results suggest that the life consequences of shyness depend upon its culturally defined gender and situation appropriateness.As children, we look ahead to many transitions: to high school, university, career, marriage, and parenthood, to name a few. American children grow to realize that they will have to act boldly and assertively to make some of these transitions successfully-to conduct a successful job search, for example. Not surprisingly, then, in an American longitudinal sample (from the Berkeley Guidance Study), shy boys made the transitions to marriage, parenthood, and career later than their nonshy peers (Caspi, Elder, & Bern, 1988). Shy girls in the same sample married and had children at the same ages as their peers, but they tended to drop out of the workforce when they married and then to remain at home. Their husbands, however, became more successful than the husbands of nonshy women.Because childhood-to-midlife longitudinal studies such as the Berkeley Guidance Study are rare, research such as this is seldom subject to the rigors of replication. However, in the present article we report a conceptual replication of Caspi et al. 's (1988) work that uses data from a birth-to-midlife Swedish longitudinal sample. We point out several ways in which these two samples differ, and we argue that our findings are as we would expect if the life course sequelae of childhood shyness had been influenced by the two societies' expectations for both culture-and gender-appropriate behavior.Swedish and American societies, from which these two samples are drawn, differ in at least two ways that might have im-
