Tell us about yourself and about your background.
I’m from China, and I earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in China, majoring in early childhood education. My previous advisor has his degree in psychology. With him, I focused on children’s developmental health and growth, especially paying attention to social and emotional development in learning. That experience showed me that what I want to explore in my research is investigating how the family environment or the important caregivers of children can influence their social-emotional learning. Then I found out that there is a major called human development and family studies and knew that this is what I really wanted to pursue. I applied to both HDFS programs and programs in co-developmental psychology in the US. And then I chose here! I think it’s a really warm and great community for me.
What aspects of the environment were you looking at?
I am looking at children’s emotional development and their pro-social behaviors. In China, many rural parents feel the need to move to the urban centers for employment, and when they do that, they wind up leaving their children behind, often with the children’s grandparents. We found that these so-called “left behind” children exhibited lower social and emotional scores. The family environment really affects their development and their developmental scores. We studied play activities between grandparents and their grandchildren. The children’s parents are in the city, so the grandparents are the primary caregivers, and we wondered whether learning activities can help protect the children from the potential risk from the distance from their parents. And if so, which ones? Because parenting behaviors are very different between parents and grandparents.
What did you find?
We used an instrument to observe parenting behavior, a rubric included for four positive subskills of parenting behavior: affection or love, responsiveness, teaching or instruction, and encouragement. We found that the level of affection did not differ between parent and grandparent, which means that the grandparent can still provide as much love as parents. However, the scores for responsiveness, teaching and encouragement subskills were quite lower than for parents.
Take responsiveness, for example. We invited the grandparents and grandchildren for ten minutes of free play activities, which we recorded. We watched the pairs play with each other, and we noted that sometimes the grandparents just watch the grandchildren. When the children solved a particular task, for instance, a task of building a tower, the grandparents often did not say, “Great job!” They didn’t say anything or show any emotion. In China, certainly, that is a generational difference. The grandparents’ love is inside their heart, but they’re not good at expressing it. But they still love their grandchild.
One potential future direction of this work is to teach grandparents how they can better interact with their grandchildren. Maybe they want to show their love and provide support, but they don’t have a great way.
You were looking at the family context for children whose parents had traveled to urban areas while the children remained behind. U. of I. is in a rural area. Were there any particularly “rural” elements to your research that informed your decision to come here?
That’s a great question. What I focus on is not the rural quality of the environment but rather the relationships and the family context. For example, I also conducted some research on preschool sites. We examined how preschool teachers taught emotions to children. We used a curriculum to ask whether we could improve children’s emotional relation skills, which we compared to a control group that did not have the curriculum. Overall, I would say that my research focuses on children’s emotional development and figuring out how families and teachers are important for socialization in the early years—and then subsequently how these findings can better support children.
Is that work that you want to continue here?
Honestly, I think it’s too early to say what I want to do in the field. People’s minds will change, right? I am very grateful to have time and opportunity to explore. Right now I am working on the mindful movement project, and I just started on the mixed-methods COVID study. Those are both exciting to me.