News and opinion

Welcome to our news and blogs section. Here you’ll find the latest developments and insights from across our longitudinal studies.

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Blog: being excluded or truant from school leads to mental health problems – and vice versa

5 March 2024

New research shows children who struggle with their mental health are more likely to later be excluded from school and to truant. And exclusion and truancy can increase their mental health difficulties.

News

Body dissatisfaction linked with depression risk in children

15 February 2024

Body dissatisfaction at age 11 is linked to increased risk of depression by age 14, according to new research from the Millennium Cohort Study.

News

Eliminating sexual violence could reduce teenage mental ill health

5 October 2022

The prevalence of serious mental health problems among 17-year-olds could drop by as much as 16.8% for girls and 8.4% for boys if they were not subjected to sexual violence, such as sexual assault and harassment, according to estimates from UCL researchers.

News

Inequalities in early child development remained stubbornly high through the 2010s

23 June 2022

Inequalities in the early cognitive, social and emotional development of children in the UK, which are so important in shaping later life outcomes, have changed little between those born in the early 2000s and those born in the early 2010s. Researchers from the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) and the Institute for Fiscal Studies […]

News

Children with behavioural problems at age five may need extra literacy support at school

21 July 2021

Children with severe conduct and hyperactivity problems at school entrance tend to gain lower scores in vocabulary tests during adolescence, according to a new study.

News

Substance use and depression more closely linked for generation Z teens

23 April 2021

Substance use and antisocial behaviour are more likely to go hand-in-hand with poor mental health for generation Z teens compared to millennial adolescents growing up a decade earlier, finds a new UCL study.

News

Being born small doesn’t tend to disadvantage IVF babies’ cognitive development

10 March 2021

Children conceived through medically assisted reproduction who are born small do just as well in cognitive tests during childhood and adolescence as naturally conceived children who are born a normal weight, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

News

10% of teenagers have tried hard drugs by age 17

10 February 2021

Almost a third of 17-year-olds have tried cannabis and one in 10 have tried harder drugs, such as cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine, with similar rates of experimentation regardless of parents’ education level, finds a new study by UCL researchers.

News

CLS researchers win impact award for mental health research

13 November 2020

Professor Emla Fitzsimons and Dr Praveetha Patalay have been awarded the 2020 ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize for their research on children and young people’s mental health.

Reading for pleasure and children’s cognitive development

6 November 2020

Research using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) has revealed how reading for pleasure can help children excel in English and maths. It has also shown that good reading habits in childhood have a significant longer term impact on people’s vocabulary, with the benefits being evident even 30 years later.

Children and young people’s mental health

5 November 2020

Looking after children’s and young people’s mental health is an urgent public health priority. Using data from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), CLS researchers and collaborators have investigated the prevalence of mental ill-health during childhood and adolescence.

News

LGB teens at greater risk of poor mental health, new study finds

19 November 2019

Lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) adolescents are five times more likely to be depressed, and almost six times more likely to have self-harmed in the past year, compared to their heterosexual peers.

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