As the study’s longtime director George Vaillant put it, “Whereas a warm childhood, like a rich father, tends to inoculate a man against future pain, a bleak childhood is like poverty; it cannot cushion the difficulties of life. Yes, difficulties may sometimes lead to post-traumatic growth, and some men’s lives did improve over time. But there is always a high cost in pain and lost opportunities, and for many men with bleak childhoods the outlook remained bleak until they died, sometimes young and sometimes by their own hands.”
