Nancy Snidman, Director of the Child Development Unit of the University of Massachusetts Boston, was Research Director of the Infant Study at Harvard, where she studied infant temperament with Professor Jerome Kagan. In this episode Nancy talks about the highly sensitive child in terms of temperament, revealing the large overlap of sensory processing problems and high reactive temperament. Professor Snidman also has some important tips for parents of children with high reactive temperament.

Katherine Schwab will discuss the interesting phenomenon of children who do not speak a word at school but are chatterboxes at home. Katherine is a therapist who works with these children and has some creative ideas about how to help them come out of their shells outside of their safety zone.

Renowned infant researcher Ed Tronick discusses a recent study of infants' responses to their mothers wearing masks.  Tronick created the famous still face experiment that demonstrated the sensitivity of infants to their mother’s contingent responses, primarily communicated by facial expression. In this study, he wanted to know whether mothers’ masking during the pandemic had an effect on their infants’ responses to their mothers when the mothers were masked.