Child and Family Well-being
A holistic perspective on children’s well-being recognizes the inter-dependence of children’s physical health, physiological stress systems, social, emotional and cognitive competence, and academic readiness and success. Children’s development in these areas is shaped by the influences of their own characteristics, parents, family, teachers, schools, sports coaches, and neighborhoods, all within the context of socioeconomic, political, social and cultural forces.
Faculty in the Child and Family Well-being Research Group are working toward understanding children’s development and well-being from a Bioecological perspective that takes a “whole child” approach, addressing individual, family, and contextual factors at multiple levels of influence. The interactions among these factors can influence whether children become vulnerable, developing adjustment problems in the response to their experiences, or resilient, emerging well-adjusted, and socially and emotionally competent.
Each developmental stage from infancy through adolescence brings with it new capabilities, as well as challenges, for children and families alike. Our faculty and affiliates examine children’s cognitive, emotional, social and behavioral adjustment along the full spectrum, from typical development to perturbations in children’s experiences, from behavioral and emotional problems to well-being and social competence, and from infancy to adolescence and emerging adulthood.
Our faculty conduct research in 4 inter-related core areas:
- Foundations for Social, Emotional & Cognitive Competence
- Adolescent Health Risk and Health Disparities
- Immigrant Families, Diversity & Disadvantage
- Violence, Anger and Aggression
Across these core areas, our research applies a Bioecological approach to understanding children’s well-being, including the examination of:
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Research in each of the core areas includes:
Foundations for Social, Emotional & Cognitive Competence:
- Poverty and the development of effortful control in preschoolers
- Mental health of children from immigrant families
- Parenting, parent-child relationships and early social-emotional development
- Emotion coaching and children’s emotion regulation
- Sports involvement, the role of coaches and parents in promoting positive youth development
- Domestic violence, children’s emotion regulation and social-emotional adjustment
- Family stress and children’s physiological stress responses
Adolescent Health Risk and Disparities:
- Risk factors in adolescent substance use
- Sexual risk taking and health
- Race, discrimination and health risk behaviors
- Stress, parenting and families
Immigrant Families, Diversity and Disadvantage:
- Mental health of children from immigrant families
- Parenting and family cultural conflict
- Socioeconomic and psychosocial predictors of mental health
Violence, Anger and Aggression:
- Domestic violence and children’s emotion regulation
- Young children’s understanding and response to anger displays
- Risk for aggression and conduct problems
- Prevention and treatment of conduct problems
Contact Liliana Lengua (liliana@u.washington.edu) with questions about the Child and Family Well-being research group.
Child and Family Well-being Faculty include:
- Rebecca Cortes is interested in the development of school based and mindful parenting interventions that promote children’s social and emotional competence. She is a co-author of Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies® (PATHS), a preschool curriculum aimed at enhancing children’s social and emotional competence. Dr. Cortes’s research focuses on the role of parenting practices and parents’ awareness of their own emotions in the development of children’s social and emotional competence, attention, and mental health.
- Cheryl Kaiser is interested in the development of self, social identity, prejudice, stigma, social justice, and the intersection of social science and law.
- Lynn Fainsilber-Katz focuses on children’s social and emotional development in the context of family relationships, including marital conflict, domestic violence, and parent’s use of emotion coaching. She is particularly interested in children's ability to regulate emotion in face of adverse environments and life events, and how parenting buffers children from negative outcomes and helps them develop successful healthy relationships with others, including peers. Her studies have involved children exposed to varying types of adverse circumstances, including domestic violence and pediatric cancer. In Dr. Katz’s most current work, she is developing a parenting intervention to promote the use of emotion coaching in families experiencing domestic violence to reduce the likelihood of behavioral and emotional problems in children.
- Nancy Kenney is interested in assisted reproductive technologies, egg donation, how these related to motherhood, the role of reproduction in women's lives, social attitudes, and experiences.
- Kevin King studies how adolescents come to use alcohol and drugs and how that use progresses into substance abuse and dependence. I am particularly interested in the mechanisms by which these processes occur, specifically how family, social and personality factors inter-relate to produce risk for substance use and disorder. Part of my work has attempted to understand whether there are phenotypic differences between forms of substance use disorders based both on etiological pathways and on symptom and impairment patterns. I also interested in how exposure to stressors impact the development of substance abuse, and how emotional and cognitive self regulation develop over time in interaction with the adolescent's environment and its stressors to produce risk for substance use disorders. Finally, I am interested in advanced statistical methods to study development and change over time, including latent growth curve modeling, structural equation modeling, hierarchical linear modeling, and advanced tests and forms of mediational processes.
- Liliana Lengua studies children’s individual differences in response to the experience of sociodemographic, psychosocial, family, and parenting risk factors. Children’s temperament, or individual differences in emotionality and self-regulation, differentiates children who are likely to develop problems in the face of risk from those who are resilient to those experiences. Dr. Lengua’s most recent work examines the development of children’s self-regulation, a core aspect of their social and emotional competence, in preschool children growing up in poverty and low income homes. Stress, family functioning, parenting and physiology are studied as potential mechanisms in children’s developing self-regulation. The information gained from this study will be used to develop an intervention that will give parents the tools they need to help their children develop this critical skill.
- Janxin Leu is interested in culture, emotion, stress, and immigrant health, and researches the mental health of children in immigrant families.
- Cari McCarty focuses on understanding risks and pathways to the development of depression in adolescence. Her research takes a preventive approach by identifying skills and competencies that may help young people cope more successfully with stress and negative emotions. She has developed a school-based intervention program “Positive Thoughts and Actions” which strives to help middle school students improve their relationships, school performance, and health behavior, with the ultimate goal of reducing the incidence of depression in young adolescents. Dr. McCarty is also interested in the role of emotionality in other problem behaviors of adolescence, including alcohol and substance use.
- Robert McMahon Assessment, Prevention, & Treatment of Conduct Disorders; Developmental Psychopathology, Child & Adolescent Tobacco Use, Family Interaction
- Betty Repacholi studies social-cognitive and emotional development in infancy and early childhood. Her main research focus has been the exploration of infants’ responses to, and understanding of, other people’s emotional expressions. For instance, her work has explored whether infants understand a) what another person is emoting about and b) that different people can have different emotional responses about the exact same object or event. Her most recent research has examined infants’ ability to engage in emotional eavesdropping, whereby infants use emotional information gleaned from other people’s social interactions, to regulate their own actions. She is also exploring the role of infant temperament, inhibitory control, parental behavior, and family emotional climate in determining how infants respond to other people’s emotional displays.
- Jane Simoni is a clinical health psychologist with interests in stress and coping, cultural influences on health, risk behaviors (especially sexual risk and substance use) and health disparities. Most of her work has focused on stigmatized and oppressed populations such as gay men and lesbians, ethnic minorities, and individuals living with HIV/AIDS.
- Ronald Smith and Frank Smoll collaborate on basic and applied research, concerning psychosocial aspects of children’s participation in youth sports. The major purposes of their Youth Enrichment in Sports project (www.y-e-sports.com) are to develop, evaluate, and disseminate psychoeducational interventions for coaches and parents that are designed to foster more positive sport outcomes for young athletes. The project initially involved development of the Mastery Approach to Coaching (MAC) and the Mastery Approach to Parenting in Sports (MAPS) workshops – two interventions that are based on principles derived from social-cognitive and achievement goal theories. The interventions were then tested and proven efficacious in a series of field experiments. The MAC and MAPS workshops have been transformed into DVD format. Future research will involve assessment of the effectiveness of the DVD self-instruction programs, after which they will be distributed to national youth sport organizations.
- Jessica Sommerville examines early social and physical reasoning and the role of agency in infant cognitive and memory development. She is particularly interested in the development of infants’ and children’s psychological understanding and causal reasoning, the ways in which these domains intersect in the course of development, and mechanisms supporting cognitive development, broadly construed.
- Wadiya Udell focuses on developing developmentally appropriate and comprehensive approaches to sexual health promotion and sexual risk prevention among adolescents. Her research involves research/community collaborations adapting effective evidence-based adolescent HIV and pregnancy prevention programs in communities of color. Dr. Udell¹s current work focuses on the processes by which religious practices and beliefs serve to protect adolescents from and/or place them at risk for risky sexual practices.
Additional Psychology faculty conducting research about children and families:
- Ted Beauchaine: Child Psychopathology, Biobehavioral Models of Disinhibition & Emotion Regulation, Clinical Research Methods, Taxometrics
- Ana Mari Cauce: At-risk Children, Adolescents, & Families; Ethnic Minority Youth; Homeless Youth; Adolescent Substance Abuse; Community Psychology
- Brian Flaherty: Measurement, Analysis of Change Over Time, Substance Use and Development of Dependence
- Peter Kahn: Social and Moral Development, Human-Robot Interaction, The Psychological Effects of Digitized Natural Information
- Andy Meltzoff: Social and Cognitive Development in Infants and Young Children, Memory, Intentionality
Contact Liliana Lengua (liliana@u.washington.edu) with questions about the Child and Family Well-being research group.