Parenting Understood

Dr. Meltzer-Body is the Assad Meymandi Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  She also directs the UNC Center for Women’s Mood Disorders and is an executive sponsor of the UNC SOM and UNC Health Well-Being initiative. Dr. Meltzer-Brody founded the UNC Perinatal Psychiatry Program in 2004 and became Chair of the UNC Department of Psychiatry in October 2019.  She investigates the epidemiologic and biological predictors of perinatal depression (PND) including genetic, neurosteroid and other neuroendocrine biomarkers as well as the impact of adverse life events. She is also the founder and lead of the Postpartum Depression Action Towards and Treatment (PACT) Consortium, and co-PI on a smartphone app (originally named PPD ACT and now rebranded as MOM GENES) that is a large scale international genetic study of PPD and postpartum.  

In today’s episode, Dr. Meltzer-Brody will be discussing with us how perinatal depression, which can impact 10-15% of mothers, is defined, what are some of the signs that one should recognize as an indicator of when to reach out for help, and finally what are some of the best treatments for perinatal depression, postpartum depression, and anxiety. Dr. Meltzer-Brody will also talk about how her smartphone app, MOM GENES, has been used to generate evidence-based research on postpartum and how to identify genetic risk factors for women who may develop postpartum depression.

You can learn more about Dr. Meltzer-Brody and her research at https://www.med.unc.edu/psych/directory/samantha-meltzer-brody/ and https://www.momgenesfightppd.org/

We are thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. Dr. Immordino-Yang studies the psychological and neurobiological bases of social emotion, self-awareness and culture and their implications for learning, development and schools. She is a Professor of Education at the USC Rossier School of Education, a Professor of Psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute, a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Program Faculty at the University of Southern California, and Director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE). She is currently PI for a school-based intervention study of the role of students’ social-emotional competencies in academic success and a PI on a study of the neural and psychosocial correlates of mindsets in low-SES adolescents from two cultural groups. Dr. Immordino-Yang also serves as scientific adviser to several Los Angeles schools/districts and is a mother of two!

Dr. Immordino-Yang will be discussing with us an often overlooked topic in parenting: understanding neuroscience to recognize how it impacts children’s psychological development. She will demonstrate how a child’s culture and emotions and feelings can shape the brain and our behaviors.  We will also explore how a children’s ability to understand meaning can impact how children view the world. Getting a grasp of these concepts can help parents be able to understand how to connect with their children and be able to better relate to children’s mindsets.

You can learn more about Dr. Immordino-Yang and her research at candle.usc.edu

On today’s Pinot and Parenting, we are thrilled to have with us Ria Simon, a community ambassador from HiMama and a former educator in elementary schools. Ria will be talking with us about the importance of building strong parent/teacher relationships and different methods and strategies that you can use to foster strong bonds with your children’s teachers or for educators how to best interact with your student’s parents. We will examine how to speak about difficult conversations and how to create engaging conversations without being overbearing. 

To learn more about Ria Simon and HiMama, please check out himama.com and The Preschool Podcast

Today we are excited to be joined by Dr. Jonathan Zimmeman. Dr. Zimmerman is a historian of Education and Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania who has spent much of his career examining how education practices and policies have developed over time. He has a special interest in how social and political movements come to shape education. Dr. Zimmerman previously taught for 20 years at NYU Steinhardt and is currently the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor in Education at University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his role in academics, Dr. Zimmerman is a proud father of two girls.

Dr. Zimmerman will discuss with us his research on how the history of the “Little Red School House” and the early foundations of education have come to shape education today. We will showcase how understanding the history of schooling and its role in family and community are crucial to analyzing where we are today and what the future holds for education and our children.

You can learn more about Dr. Zimmerman and his work at the following link: https://www.gse.upenn.edu/academics/faculty-directory/zimmerman

Today we are excited to be joined by Jorge Cuartas. Jorge is a PhD candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-author of Corporal Punishment and Elevated Neural Response to Threat in Children. He researches the negative impacts of violence including harsh discipline as it impacts children. He recently addressed the House of Representatives in Colombia as they considered a federal ban on corporal punishment.

Jorge will discuss with us why spanking continues to be prevalent amongst parents across the world. Furthermore, he will explain how his research has demonstrated the negative and dangerous impacts of spanking and corporal punishment. While spanking is often done with the intention of creating good behavior, Jorge will present how the effects can actually be the opposite.

Today we are excited to be joined by Dr. Tyler Watts. ​​Dr. Watts is an Assistant Professor of Developmental Psychology in the Department of Human Development at Teachers College, Columbia University. He studies educational policies designed to promote the cognitive and socio-emotional development of children from underserved communities. He worked as a Research Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Scholar at New York University, and received his Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Watts will discuss his study of revisiting the famous delayed gratification experiment known as the “Marshmallow Test” and will explain how his discoveries shed new light on what we know about delayed gratification as it relates to long-term behavior and personality. We will see how delayed gratification alone does not determine child wellbeing, but there are many other factors that must be accounted for in a holistic approach to predicting outcomes.

To learn more about Dr. Watts and his research, please check out his website at: https://tylerwatts.org/

In this episode, we will hear from Dr. Gregory Hanley, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, past Associate Editor of The Behavior Analyst, and past Editor of Behavior Analysis in Practice and of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. Dr. Hanley currently advises doctoral candidates as a Research Professor at WNEU, serves as an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and leads FTF Behavioral, the international training and consulting group based in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is primarily focused on the assessment, treatment, and prevention of problem behavior and sleep problems, teaching strategies for developing life skills, and empirically-derived values for practitioners. Dr. Hanley will discuss the common sleep problems that most children experience and explain how behavioral intervention management and function based approaches and strategies can be successfully used to combat some of these sleep challenges.

You can find more information on Dr Hanley and his free sleep assessment tool at the link below:

https://practicalfunctionalassessment.com/ and https://ftfbc.com/

In this episode, we are excited to speak with Dr. Melissa Goldstein, a pediatrician at Carnegie Hill Pediatrics. Along with her practice and research in pediatrics, Dr. Goldstein dedicates much of her time to helping families navigate the steps to adoption, practicing adoption medicine and offering pre-adoption medical counseling.

Dr. Goldstein speaks with us regarding the adoption process domestically and looking at the research and resources that support the best practices for navigating adoption. After this episode, we hope you will be able to begin to understand what to expect with the adoption process whether or not adoption may be in your future.

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Brigitte Vittrup, Department Chair of Human Development, Family Studies, and Counseling at Texas Woman’s University. Dr. Vittrup’s academic and research interests include racial socialization; children's racial attitudes; child discipline; and media influences on children. Our conversation focuses on the important topic of discussing race with your young children. While this is often an uncomfortable discussion point, Dr. Vittrup explains why it is essential to have these topics and not avoid them. Dr. Vittrup explains the do’s and don'ts of talking about race and how to use a color conscious approach for speaking with children. She also provides useful resources on ways to begin these conversations.

Resources mentioned in episode: Book : All the Colors We Are/Todos los colores de nuestra piel: The Story of How We Get Our Skin Color/La historia de por qué tenemos diferentes colores de piel by Katie Kissinger

Book: Something Happened in Our Town (A Child's Story About Racial Injustice) by Marianne Celano

Teachingtolerance.org

Embracerace.org

You can find more information on Dr. Vittrup at https://apps.twu.edu/my1cv/profile.aspx?type=twp&id=4pCl%2bq%2b7SWo4Rjfa%2fZ3otQ%3d%3d&dept=humandev

Dana Charles McCoy is an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). Her work focuses on understanding the ways that poverty-related risk factors in children's home, school, and neighborhood environments affect the development of their cognitive and socioemotional skills in early childhood. Her research looks at both domestic and international contexts.

Dr. McCoy will speak to us about her work developing The Caregiver Reported Early Development Index (CREDI) and how it is used to measure population-level development for children under age 3 as an easy, cost-effective, and culturally-neutral way of gathering data. CREDI helps to identify basic, universal that can be seen and measured taking into account cultural considerations. This has been especially helpful as other forms of assessment continue to be outdated or only viewed through one cultural lens. We hope that this episode will help you to see that just because values are different amongst groups doesn't mean they are wrong!

To learn more about Dr. McCoy’s research, please visit https://seed.gse.harvard.edu/