Main Discipline(s):
Main Professional Societies:
Affiliation(s):
- Psychology
- Society for Research in Child Development
- Behavioral Medicine
- Wayne State University, Merrill Palmer Skillman Institute for Child & Family Development
Masters of Science (M.S.) in Applied Developmental Psychology, University of New Orleans.
Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Applied Developmental Psychology, University of New Orleans.
My work focuses on finding accessible ways to promote positive parenting, especially for young children with challenging behavior and parents that are experiencing a lot of stress or adversity in their lives. I have created two online parenting interventions that use text messages and online videos to teach research-based parenting skills. The first program is called 5-a-Day Parenting and teaches parents things they can do each day to promote their young child’s school readiness (that is, being prepared to start kindergarten). The second program is the Parenting Young Children Check-up, which is a program for parents of young children with challenging behavior and is intended for parents to start engaging in the program while waiting at a pediatric appointment. I am interested in continuing to enhance these programs, with input from parents, and implementing and evaluating them in community-based settings that parents already use (like child care centers and pediatric primary care).
Beyond intervention development and implementation, I am broadly interested in young children’s mental health and parents’ mental health. Specifically, I am interested in how parents’ mental health impacts parenting and how parenting impacts young children’s mental health. I am also really committed to understanding the role community factors, like social support and a sense of community, have in promoting parents’ well-being and positive parenting.
When I started college, I knew I was very interested in parenting and I became interested in parenting interventions when I began working on a project at Eastern Michigan University to implement Parent Management Training-Oregon Model to community mental health centers in Michigan. I became interested in highly accessible parenting intervention after becoming a parent myself and realizing that the internet and my child’s pediatrician were the main sources of support and information for me about parenting. I’ve used these personal experiences as a starting point for creating parenting interventions that I hope parents will find accessible.
I would really like to be part of shifting our focus on how, and how often, clinical interventions are delivered. Historically mental health interventions, and by extension parenting interventions, are delivered once a week, in person, for 45 minutes or an hour over the course of at least several months. There is now this shift in thinking that maybe much briefer intervention, even single session interventions, could be effective for some people. There is also a shift in considering how interventions are delivered with an interest in using the internet, text messages, schools, and primary care to deliver intervention material. Changing how interventions are delivered could remove barriers and promote more equitable delivery of interventions for families. I would like to be part of changing conceptions about child mental health and parenting interventions so that parents see less barriers to accessing information to help them with parenting challenges.
This is a tough question, but I am going to go with Mary Ainsworth who is one of the most influential early researchers on attachment theory. I really admire her as a pioneering woman in STEM and how she took the rather vague idea of children forming an attachment to their caregiver and operationalized it and came up with a standardized way to assess attachment. Without her contribution, we would not have the scientific understanding of attachment that has been so central in creating parenting interventions.