The child is parent of the adult: A longitudinal examination of the effect of adolescent destructive deviance on lifetime career success

Drawing upon career stage theory, we investigate the long-term effect of deviance in adolescence on lifetime career success. Specifically, we propose that individuals’ destructive deviance in adolescence is positively related to risk-taking propensity, which is then negatively related to their long-term career success (e.g., income increase). The analyses of growth models with a multilevel longitudinal dataset, which includes 12,686 participants with 33,334 year-level career tracks, generally support the hypotheses. Further, we find that educational achievement moderates the relationship between risk-taking propensity and long-time career success. We discuss the implications of these results for research on career development and parenting.