Na Zhang, Ph.D., is the Director of the Family Resilience And Mindfulness Empowerment (FRAME) lab and Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences at UConn. Dr. Zhang has completed a National Institute of Health T32 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Arizona State University’s REACH Institute. Additionally, Dr. Zhang earned her Ph.D. in Family Social Science with a Prevention Science Minor from the University of Minnesota.

The FRAME lab studies mindfulness in divorcing/separating families, a project funded by the National Institute of Health. The ultimate goal is to develop a mindfulness app that can be added to an existing digital evidence-based parenting intervention for divorced/separated parents as a self-help tool. Dr. Zhang expects the project to have real-world impacts on reducing mental health problems and stress in divorced parents as well as improving the well-being of their children. The FRAME lab is inviting divorcing or recently divorced mothers or fathers to participate in their study. Please reach out if you are interested. Email the lab at frame.lab@uconn.edu or call/text them at 203-561-7045.

Learn more about the FRAME lab here!

As a family scholar and prevention scientist, Dr. Zhang mainly studies the intrapersonal and interpersonal pathways involved in the development of psychopathology and resilience among youth and adults who were exposed to stressful or traumatic experiences. A major focus of her research is on the development and evaluation of behavioral parent training programs that consider parents as the agents of change. Dr. Zhang has investigated how effective parenting may lead to resilience outcomes in children from at-risk families and the applications of mindfulness training as an intervention strategy to strengthen and optimize parenting programs.

Dr. Zhang’s favorite activities include playing at home with her four-year-old son! Together, they play puzzles, Legos, and pretend games!

Friendships are something that we see in all areas in life. From infancy to adults, we experience them at all ages… but how important are friendships in adolescence? From Theory of Mind to why we are walking at the same pace as our best friend, this short four-minute TED Talk dives into the development of friendships and the science behind it. Just like other aspects of development, friendships are way deeper than just their appearance. They allow for the development of various social skills and even areas in the brain!

To watch the full TED Talk, click here!

Mikayla Clemens

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

 

The holidays are full of family gatherings. For some parents and children, this may prompt anxiety and stress. Parents may feel others might judge them for their parenting styles or put them under pressure to act a certain way. These feelings can contribute to unnecessary added stress. 

It’s important to set boundaries and decide what is important to you as a parent. Having input from other parents can be helpful but isn’t necessary. Parents should communicate ahead of time on issues that might be critical or controversial. Most importantly, it’s crucial to remember that babies and young children are unpredictable. Planning for new situations can help alleviate some stress during the holiday season.

Read the full article here.

Emma Dineen

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Good afternoon and welcome to Trivia Tuesday!

This week’s question is: when does hand-eye coordination start to develop?

1. 3 months
2. 10 months
3. 2 years
4. 1 1/2 years

 

The last question we asked before break was: “Effortful control is the ability to control one’s actions. When does this typically develop in childhood?” The correct answer is… around 2 ½ to 3 years old! This is associated with behavioral skills, social skills, and even later through academic achievement.

 

Tune in next Tuesday to find out the answer to this week’s question!

Part of a child’s development involves the acquisition of empathy, an important trait to have for engaging with others in job settings, school environments and with family. Empathy, or the ability to “walk in another person’s shoes” is thought to appear in children at around age four or five. Not all children, however, easily obtain this trait. Autistic children struggle to display empathetic characteristics partially due to lower levels of mirror neuron activation of emotion areas in the brain.

Researchers analyzed this situation and considered ways to help autistic children become more empathetic through a video game. The game involves an avatar that displays basic human needs and the settings in which they take place. Children would then have to act as a caregiver to the avatar and be responsible for fulfilling their needs. For example, the child would bring the avatar to the kitchen when hungry for a meal. It was found that participation in the game made children further understand the avatars’ needs and the responses they took to those needs.

 

Read the full article here!

 

Nolyette Verastegui

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

 

Some of our best memories as children originate from playing. However, as time goes on, children could be playing less, which could be negatively impacting their mental health. Current researchers are claiming that increases in children’s mental health issues could be at least partially due to a decrease in independent playtime.

While there are other factors that could be contributing to the increase in poor mental health in children, playtime allows children to use their imagination and express themselves. Children with less independent playtime have less time to explore different aspects of the world and who they are.

Read the full article here.

Emma Dineen

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

This article focuses on the language development of Spanish-learning infants who are part of low socioeconomic status families and the parental influences that play a role in this acquisition. Researchers were trying to understand if earlier experience with language was linked to language efficiency processing in infants. Also, a key question was if this early language experience influences later vocabulary knowledge. 

Researchers observed speech accessible to 19 month old infants through audio recording technology. Audio recordings observed child-directed speech as well as overheard speech from the parents. Results showed that the total amount of adult speech recorded varied significantly, with one of the lowest word counts being fewer than 2,000 and the highest almost 29,000. It was also found that children who experienced more child-directed speech earlier at 19 months had larder vocabularies at 24 months. The article gives helpful insight into what sorts of outcomes we see when adults interact verbally with their children and how they contribute to their child’s language acquisition.

Read the full article here!

 

Nolyette Verastegui

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Sign language is something that is commonly used around the world to connect deaf individuals with individuals who can hear. Sadly, in Nicaragua, there was not always deaf education provided to help teach young children sign language. However, this did not stop the children there from learning how to communicate with the people around them.

Ann Senghas talks on this episode of Radiolabs about how these children developed a language to break the barriers they had once experienced. She evaluated the language they used for over 30 years, and even within this time, was able to witness how much the language changed. Language is something that is so important for development, and it is so impactful to witness how language can come to be even in adverse situations.

To listen to more click here!

Mikayla Clemens

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Picture this: You are a child receiving a cookie from your parents. Your sibling also receives the sweet treat but cut in half. You become frustrated because you believe that they were given two cookies while you were given a single one, when really, that is not the case. This phenomenon is called conservation, established by psychologist Jean Piaget. 

According to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, the preoperational stage of development in children involves cognition errors. Children between the ages of four and seven are said to make conservation errors, not being able to understand that altering a substance’s appearance (like cutting the cookie in half) does not change its basic properties (it being a single cookie). Instead, children in this stage of development focus on centration; focusing their attention on a single characteristic of a situation (the amount of cookies seen) and disregarding others (the cookie being cut in half).

Importantly, children’s developmental milestones differ greatly, and not every child will go through these developmental stages as is stated. However, Piaget’s discovery of the preoperational stage serves as a basis for common logical mistakes made by children aged four to seven.

Read the full article here!

 

Nolyette Verastegui

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS