The Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Health and Development in Young Children

An in-depth overview and study of how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) affect behaviours in adulthood. ACEs could be financial hardships, separation of parents, physical, emotion or psychological harm and so on. Research shows that by just reducing the numbers of ACEs a child's outcome of success would improve.

Similar to prior ACE research, this study finds significant predictive power in cumulative ACE count and increased odds for worse overall outcomes with high ACE scores [...] Conversely, children with no or low ACEs were less likely to experience health and developmental difficulties, and are therefore, likely to continue experiencing success on age salient tasks [...]

Now I've grossly simplified and the full article is worth the read. HackerNews user, mrguyorama, had this great point:

This is also one reason why something like "Free food at school for anyone who wants it" is so damn effective, because it eliminates an entire class of ACEs from all those kids[...]