School success is pivotal for minoritized youth from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds to achieve upward social mobility. Using data from the California Families Project, a longitudinal study of 674 Mexican-origin youth living in the United States, the present study examined the association between trajectories of psychiatric disorders from late childhood to adolescence and a wide range of high school outcomes assessed via school records. Psychiatric disorders were examined at different levels of breadth, including individual psychiatric disorders, internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, and total symptoms. Results of latent growth curve models showed that youth exhibiting more overall psychiatric symptoms had lower high school grade point averages and achievement test scores, took fewer challenging courses during high school, and were less likely to attend college compared with youth exhibiting fewer symptoms. Counterintuitively, faster increases (or slower decreases) in psychiatric symptoms were associated with more positive school outcomes. These findings were similar for boys and girls and for youth born in the United States and Mexico. Incremental validity analyses showed that temperament levels were more robust predictors of school outcomes than psychiatric disorder levels. Developmentally, changes in temperament and psychiatric disorders independently predicted school outcomes. Overall, temperament levels and slopes had incremental validity over psychiatric disorder levels and slopes, suggesting that temperament may be a better target of intervention efforts to promote school success than psychiatric symptoms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Cheng et al. (Mon,) studied this question.