Today's new word is TRAJECTORY

At least it is new to me the way it is used in Archives of General Psychiatry 2008;65(10) 1185-1192. My sense of the word was that it had something to do with a bullet or something flying through space in some sort of predictable line and going splat. Not so in the social sciences, apparently.

Peer-victimization trajectories
pre-school trajectories
developmental trajectories

I scoured the internet dictionaries trying to nail down a definition, but I guess you have to sit in a classroom and hear it to grasp the meaning. It sounds a lot more hopeless and set in stone than "direction," or "path." First, in case you weren't sure, "peer-victimization" is bullying. I was pretty sure it was, but had to go to the article and look for keywords or tags. Usually, finding a summary of a medical article in layman's language is helpful. This article in Medical News Today manages to summarize the original and only use the word “trajectory” once--maybe they were confused too. Their title was “How And Why Certain Children Receive Chronic Peer Abuse” instead of "Predictive Validity and Early Predictors of Peer-Victimization Trajectories in Preschool." You get paid more if you've got a fancy title.

What I got out of the article, other than a vision of seeing little kids hurtling through the air from pre-school into a gang of bullies in high school, is that the parents’ behavior and the child’s behavior cause something in the dynamics that invites bullying by other children. I’ve read it through several times and don’t see any other conclusion. The children are aggressive or hyperactive from a very early age, and the parents have poor skills and react harshly. When these children are around other kids, they are doing something that causes the other children to react mean or negative. Also, the same predictors for poverty (teen mother, single parent, low education) seem to be in the bullying scenario.

Conclusion: Early childhood preventive interventions should target parenting skills and child behaviors, particularly within families with insufficient income.

Short of taking the children away from the parents, I don’t know where this research is going, because a few public service announcements on public television (I've seen them about 6 a.m. and wonder who is watching) or a one hour parenting class at the Y probably isn’t going to change much, but the concept sure is fodder for the grant money. What do you think (if you’ve read the article.)