Dr. Kristin Valentino: Education, Analyzed.

AUDREY SCOTT:
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You’re listening to Think. Pair. Share. with me, Audrey Scott.

I’m happy to welcome Dr. Kristin Valentino to Think. Pair. Share. Kristin is the Director of the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families and a Professor of Psychology, as well as an Institute for Educational Initiatives Fellow. Her research focuses on the transactional nature through which children’s interactions with their family, community, and culture can shape the course of their development. She is interested in how the integration of biological, psychological and environmental factors can inform our understanding of the development of memory and self among maltreated children - looking at what we can do to intervene and prevent maltreatment from happening in the first place - ultimately improving the overall life of the family.

Hi Kristin!

KRISTIN VALENTINO: Hello!

AS: Thanks for joining me via zoom today from just a few blocks away from campus - just north of Edison on Ironwood. It was the first time I was at the Shaw Center. How long have you guys been in this building?
 
KV: It's been here since I joined the faculty. I joined in 2009 and I believe it had been here for a few years before that. There were some labs in here prior to it being the Shaw Center and prior to that it was a bowling alley.
 
AS: Stop, really?
 
KV:: yeah it was a Bowling alley so it's an oddly shaped building with some like odd remnants of the bowling alley still, still around. So it's an interesting, it's an interesting facility, but it's a great location, because we're like right out in the community and a bus comes to the corner so it's easier for folks who want to take public transportation to find us and get to us so yeah we like the spot that we're in.
 
AS: That's great. Okay wonderful. I have been over there, for I think there's like an outlet store...
 
KV: Yes! It shares the building with us. They're connected to the back of us and it causes a lot of our faculty to have far too many Notre Dame items.
 
AS: It's a perk or maybe not so much a perk of where you are. So good. I’m going to jump us into that fun section, okay?
 
KV: Okay, 
 
AS: So the first ones are some rapid fire ones, all right? So...
 
KV: Sure.
 
AS: Chocolate or vanilla.
 
KV: Vanilla.
 
AS: Dogs or cats.
 
KV: I like dogs better, but I have two cats because they're easier to take care of.
 
AS: I like that answer, except for I'm  deathly allergic to cats, so...
 
KV: Oh.
 
KV: Cats are growing on me, though, we have these two cats that are sisters and they're pretty cute.
 
AS: What are their names?
 
KV: Elinor and Merida.
 
AS: I like those. Did you name them or your children did?
 
KV: Actually, the shelter named them. So they named - they’re, they’re tabby cats and they have kind of orangish hair, so they're named after the characters in the movie Brave.
 
AS: Oh, yes.
 
KV: So, technically, it's Queen Elinor and Merida.
 
AS: That's a good movie. Cute names. Okay, sorry, back to the rapid fire. Books or movies?
 
KV: Books.
 
AS: Summer or winter?
 
KV: Winter.
 
AS: Sweet or savory?
 
KV: Sweet.
 
AS: Oh, okay, thanks. That's the end of the rapid fire ones, so you did very well. The next one is probably a little silly, but that's okay. Which of Snow White’s seven dwarfs is your favorite? Do you need me to name them for you?
 
KV: No, I know them. Oh man. I think Grumpy is kind of my favorite, honestly. The Grumpy one is so funny and it's just interesting to see how everybody else reacts to him. I mean that's a really good sign that I'm a psychologist, right? That I'm like, interested in what makes the Grumpy character grumpy, but I think he's the funniest.
 
AS: What a great answer. When was the last time you did something for the first time?
 
KV: That's a hard question. I don't know... last I did something for the very first time. I would say, maybe a year ago. So my my kids all drive race cars and they compete as racecar drivers, which my husband did as a kid and they're really, really into it and I had - I didn't - I grew up on the east coast, so I have no background in in race car knowledge, except like driving on the Long Island Expressway. There was a mom's race and they talked me into getting into one of these race cars and going for it and I had never sat in one before, no practice. But it didn't go that well, so. I gave it a good shot. My family didn't totally set me up for success - like they didn't change the seat belts or anything so I was like - strapped in really tight and I couldn't see and the helmet didn't fit me quite well, but I went out there and was really fast and hit, like everything and then decided I didn't want to break everybody stuff.
 
AS: Oh my gosh. Was it fun at least?
 
KV: It was fun slash terrifying. The best part honestly, though, was right before the race all the kids including my son was like trying to give me as many tips as possible that, like you know how to win and what to do and want to walk around the track with me and show me very specific pointers and it was really sweet to, I don’t know, hear his encouragement and coaching.
 
AS: Oh, that is nice. How old are your children?
 
KV: I have a 12 year old, a nine year old and a five year old.
 
AS: So it was the five year old giving you the advice?
 
KV: (laughs) No. Although now she's driving, so I'm sure she's got a lot of advice as well.
 
AS: Well, you were brave and...
 
KV: Thank you.
 
AS: I think the Long Island Expressway experience, though, probably does qualify you as a.
 
KV: I thought so too. I figured I know how to get in there and cut people off. I was gonna be great, but I don’t know, it didn’t go the way I thought it was gonna go.
 
AS: Next time. Is there one fun fact about you that people may not know?
 
KV: Gosh, fun fact...
 
AS: or not so fun fact, whichever.
 
KV: One interesting fact is that when I started college, I was, I was in Army ROTC and I started college on a scholarship for for that and and I really, really enjoyed it and learned a ton about leadership, and it was a really valuable experience.
 
AS: Wow. That is a fun fact.
 
KV: Yeah. It was cool. We, we did things that you would never do in college or otherwise, you know, one of they had a lot of… Once a semester we have some field training exercises and they took us somewhere and and like dropped us off in the dark, with a compass, we had to work together and fight our way back and, I mean, those are really important skills that I did not have prior to being a part of our ROTC, so.
 
AS: Oh my gosh, see, lots of little, little tidbits. I would love to just hear a little bit about your background. I see you were on the east coast…
 
KV: Yeah, I grew up in New York, I grew up on Long Island. And I went to Georgetown University as an undergrad and I came in thinking that I was pre MED and as I took other courses in the liberal arts I sort of you know had my horizons broadened and I took, I took this one class actually where - it was an English class - where we were tutoring young kids at a public school in DC - very high poverty, low literacy rates - and that started to get me interested in in the topic of education, adversity, and then I started working in some psychology labs that were also you know focused on some of those same topics and I ended up you know sort of deciding that one of the things I really wanted to pursue was you know research on childhood adversity and what are the things that we can do to improve their developmental outcomes, you know in many different domains and I’ve ended up focusing on child abuse and neglect, in particular, and I think that was largely driven by one other course that I took as an undergraduate where, it was focused on developmental psychopathology, that was the name of the class, but we each had the opportunity to serve as an individual mentor to a child who was at an inpatient residential facility. And the little boy that I had been paired with just had a really extreme trauma history and - history of abuse and neglect - and I got really interested in just understanding more about what's happening in those families, and you know how does that impact kids and what are the ways that we can support those those families moving forward, so I went on to Grad school to focus on that more specifically.
 
AS: Would you mind helping me understand what psychopathology means?
 
KV: Yeah. Psychopathology is a way of referring to mental illness. Folks talk about different disorders, you know, like depression or anxiety and different ways and so psychopathology is another way of thinking about - or another term to refer to - some of those forms of mental illness.
 
AS: It’s sort of an umbrella?
 
KV: Yeah, and it's a way of also I guess thinking about these things, not from a disease model as much so, in the medical profession, you sort of have a disease or you don't whereas you could think of psychopathology more on a continuum so you might have you know some symptoms of depression, but not meet criteria to to be depressed and sort of the line between those matters a little bit less from the psychology, or the developmental psychology, framework we're kind of interested in that whole continuum rather than thinking about these mental illnesses from a disease framework in terms of it's a category that you are in or you're not in.
 
AS: Okay gotcha. Great. Thank you. And actually, relatively recently congratulations on becoming the Director of the Shaw Center for Children and Families. 
 
KV: Thank you.
 
AS: You're welcome. Tell me about the Shaw Center and the work that you do there.
 
KV: Sure, the Shaw Center for Children and Families focuses on four key areas of research or research themes, so it focuses on adversity, relationships, well being, and also interventions or translational research. And so all the work here focuses on one or more of those themes and the work that I do focuses on trying to address childhood adversity, address child maltreatment, in particular by enhancing the parent-child relationship through intervention work and we think that will improve child well being as well. So here at the Shaw Center we run a child and family therapy clinic so a small number of families can receive some direct clinical services through best practice, evidence based treatment approaches, alongside our intervention projects which are developing new interventions and treatments and we're currently testing how well they're working and if they're effective.
 
AS: You say maltreatment. Is that part of a specific choice?
 
KV: Yes, the term child maltreatment encompasses different subtypes of victimization. So it includes child physical abuse and child sexual abuse, but it also includes childhood neglect and neglect actually tends to be the most common form of maltreatment so that's failure to provide appropriate supervision, lack of supervision, failure to provide for children's needs, and you know that that can border up a little bit against poverty, but it's not the same thing as poverty, it's much more extreme. And it also can include emotional maltreatment, so, inflicting emotional harm on kids, as well.
 
AS: Thank you for clarifying that. It feels to me that in recent years, people have been more open to speaking about mental health. Is that true? Do you see that?
 
KV: I think that that's true, I think that the more that folks talk about mental health and mental health is normalized - the more that folks are interested in or willing to discuss and seek out services. So I think that's great. I mean, I guess, in some ways a lot of public figures have talked much more openly about mental illness in recent years, and I think in some ways that does make a big difference in being a role model for others. I think that's important right because a lot of folks could benefit from some extra support and that's one of the reasons why I kind of like to think about psychopathology rather than having a mental illness or not, because if everybody, it sort of doesn't matter if you think that your symptoms are severe enough to meet criteria for a disorder, like you, could you could still benefit likely from individual therapy, learning skills to you know cope with hard feelings or emotions or difficult situations and the more people can be open to that, I think, the better.
 
AS: Yeah, I agree. You mentioned finding ways to cope. That must be a large focus of what you guys are doing. Can you help me understand, are you working mostly with children, or is it really entirely you need the whole family sort of involved?
 
KV: Sure. So, in in my research I primarily work with preschool age children and and their mothers and we've worked with dads too it just tends to be in this particular population where we're focused on families where maltreatment has occurred, that a large percentage of the mom is the primary caregiver, and so we really focus on teaching coping skills through teaching moms a bit about how to help their children talk about emotions and talk about how to cope with those emotions. And so rather than teaching the children directly we spend quite a bit of time trying to enhance the communication between mom and child and teach mom ways to talk with her kids about how they're feeling, why they might feel that way, and then, when it comes to negative emotions, what did they do to cope with those feelings, what are the things that worked? They can also talk about ideas that they have for next time. So, reminiscing about past emotional experiences, and, and especially talking about how we resolve negative emotions is a really powerful tool that parents can use to teach children more effective coping strategies. So that's what we tried to do in the context of the intervention that I developed for maltreated preschool aged children and their mothers, because in this population, we tended to observe that moms talked a bit less to their children generally and they talked quite a bit less about emotions, in particular. And this emotion-socialization and emotion-talk is really important. In the absence of that, paired with having emotional experiences, right? Kids who've experienced abuse and neglect. have some pretty big negative emotions that they're trying to cope with and so, if we can encourage parents to help talk about like the everyday experiences, when you feel sad or angry or scared it also will help in terms of how to cope with some of these bigger reasons why you might feel sad or angry or scared and you know sort of working our way up from there. And at the same time it enhances the parent-child relationship and that support from parents is so critical and really helps children feel confident and secure, and prepared to engage in relationships with peers and navigate the world and so we try to do both at the same time, by encouraging these emotions socialization skills, but but doing it through moms to teach that to their children and try to enhance their relationship, at the same time.
 
AS: What do you do when the whole world has negative emotions? When the whole work is upset and scared. The pandemic was like, um, everyone is at your doorstep ready for some therapy, I think.
 
KV: Right? Yeah, it's totally true but everybody can, I think the pandemic in some ways, though, opened the door for a lot of people to feel like it's okay to reach out and engage in some services and individual supports or group level support because  it's definitely an experience - everybody uses the word - it’s unprecedented. You know and it feels like sometimes I think people are worried that whatever they're going through isn't significant enough to warrant reaching out to ask for help and maybe this sort of normalized like we're all going through a really, really challenging time and it's okay for everybody to reach out and learn some new skills and gain some extra supports.
 
AS: You're right, I think that people did feel maybe a little bit more - I don't know - open to, to seeking some some help, so... 
 
KV: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean that that is a positive, I guess, a silver lining perhaps of the pandemic…
 
AS: I’m interested in this dynamic of Notre Dame and the Shaw Center working with and for people in the South Bend community. How does that work?
 
KV:  All the faculty who are here at the Shaw Center also have a home department. And so i'm a member of the psychology department, many of our core faculty are in the psychology department, actually, although we do have affiliates from several other departments.including, for example, anthropology and sociology and things like that. So I used to teach developmental psychology every year, as my big lecture class. In more recent years I have been teaching a class similar to what I had taken as an undergrad. It's a community based learning course where I have upper level seniors paired with children in foster care. So they mentor children in foster care in St. Joe County and meet with me once a week to go over research and readings relevant to understanding how child maltreatment affects development, understand more about the child welfare system, and the foster care system and some social policies around that, but I think they learn the most from their individual experiences trying to serve as a mentor to youth who are currently in foster care.
 
AS: How do you find the people that need the care that you guys are offering?
 
KV: For my course, we pair the Department of Child Services and they help identify kids who would really benefit from having a mentor and when it comes to my research, we've advertised, you know broadly about the programs that we have, but the Department of Child Services has actually also been a really great partner for my research they're really supportive of trying to offer new programs to families who are involved with them and we had a really great relationship with them.
 
AS: Great. Your goal is to start with very young children...
 
KV: Yeah. I think starting from early childhood it's a great time to intervene to help children on more positive developmental trajectories and so some of the skills that we're trying to enhance, in terms of what we're teaching moms and then conveying to kids in terms of improving their emotion regulation and coping skills, those are all things that will then help them be better prepared when they enter you know formal education systems, and you know get ready for kindergarten and need to know how to regulate their emotions when things don't go their way and learn how to sit through class and and things like that, and then on from there. So you know, emotion regulation and socio-emotional learning, I think, are really critical foundations for enabling kids to take the most advantage of educational opportunities that they have.
 
AS: Yes, absolutely. Talk to me about the kinds of cases that you see and, and why those matter to you.
 
KV: Yeah. A lot of the families that we work with are situations where the child's been exposed to some neglect. And a lot of times that neglect comes from the fact that, you know the moms are overwhelmed with other things going on in their lives, or I can think of one case, in particular where mom was in a violent relationship and because of that violent relationship and not being able to quite end that relationship that her children were exposed to some dangerous situations. But she was very eager to keep her family together and she ended that violent relationship and was eager to learn, you know, new skills that can help support her kids because she realized that her children had a lot of externalising behavior problems, throwing temper tantrums, screaming, crying and she was struggling with how to cope with that and teach them how to cope with that and she was a really great participant in our intervention, because she really was eager to think about how do I talk with my kids about their feelings and she even said, like it didn't occur to me that he didn't have the words to say how he was feeling, so he showed me with his rage and she said it's just really amazing to me to now that we're talking about it that he now has the words to say, “I'm frustrated” and that that goes such a long way, for me, being able to then explain to him, like what can we do when you're frustrated. And how do we cope with being frustrated and instead of it getting to the point where he would throw a temper tantrum or hit somebody or something and so she really latched on, I think, to the broader concepts that we were trying to teach her and trying to teach the kids and really saw the value in being able to talk with her kids about those things because they did they did have some big feelings about the things that they had been exposed to, and she knew that they were affecting them but didn't have like the language or the tools, I think, to communicate with her kids and so it was pretty rewarding to hear her sort of be able to say to us the exact types of things that we were trying to teach without… we hadn't explicitly said those things to her, we were just trying to say you know why don't you try talking with him about a time he felt sad and ask him how he felt, and if you didn't if he doesn't know, then you know say tell him what you think and say the name of that feeling and she was she was really able to learn those skills really well, and sort of immediately saw some positive changes in her kids that I think we're really motivating then for her to try and keep using these skills moving forward.
 
AS: I love that story and I'm wondering - she sounds like a wonderful participant in this -  what happens if the mom is not as receptive? 
 
KV: Yeah. Parents respond in all different ways and there's a lot of individual differences in openness and things. I think a lot of parents, though, can sort of agree that they wish that they could communicate with their kids better or that they wish they had more skills for improving communication with their kids like I wish I could still learn more you know skills for communicating with my kids because it constantly changes as they get older. You need to change your tactics and learn new things or be open to new ideas. So I think it's something so we come at it from that direction and we're also really intentional in how we engage families and how we give feedback to families. So one thing that we really focus on is giving positive feedback and highlighting the things that they did well. And and when implementing the intervention, we really tried hard to not provide critical feedback and point out the things that they did not do well. Because a lot of these moms just feel very vulnerable because they've come to the attention of the different child services, they have a substantiated case against them, they have a lot of a lot of people saying that you're not a good parent. And they want to be good parents, so the more that we could do to highlight the things that they're doing well, the more engaged people tend to become and that allows more learning to you know to occur and and things like that, so you know, of course, you know, not everybody buys in fully, but I think, for the most part, we were able to get the vast majority of our moms to at least try the techniques that we were trying to teach and you know once once they've used them a few times and have some positive conversations with their kids, I think that's very motivating. Probably the most challenging families to work with are families where the child may have some limited verbal skills and if moms working really hard and the child doesn't say that much back - those are the cases where I think it's the most difficult for moms to feel motivated to to persevere - whereas the more highly verbal kids who are saying so much back to them that's super motivating for families.
 
AS: If the home life is disrupted in some way, it manifests itself in the classroom for these young children. Are you seeing that? Is that where you try to intervene in that situation?
 
KV: Yeah I mean, so I think a lot of the families that participated in the program that we designed were a little bit younger than being in formal schooling, but I do think that, yes, absolutely like these kids are facing quite a bit more than some of their peers, and having parental support is a really important: factor for kids educational success and their ability to navigate their classrooms and and things like that so to the extent that we could improve parents support and also parent I guess interest and curiosity and their kids and I think that also makes a big difference as they you know enter the formal school system, and you know move on from there, so one of the things that we were we've been seeing is that some of the moms initially, well, through the intervention became more interested in their kids thoughts and feelings, as opposed to being interested in their behaviors and trying to make the connection that their children's thoughts and feelings may lead to some of the behaviors that they're seeing and if they could think more about or understand more about their thoughts and feelings that that would be helpful and I think that that also helps as as kids enter the classrooms and are a little more prepared and parents can also sort of anticipate and think about how their kids are approaching school and feeling in the classroom and what challenges they're facing and sort of interpret their behavior through that lens.
 
AS: When you see the parent make that kind of connection… How does that feel for you?
 
KV: It's really rewarding because sometimes, parents and kids get into really negative cycles of misbehavior, and then it gets challenging to get out of that cycle of you know well, if my child did this, then I have to take this away. And it starts to erode the parent child relationship, and to the extent that we can we can help parents think about behaviors and where they might come from and to be trying to think about also creating some positive moments for the parent and child. So sitting and reminiscing about a past event could be an opportunity for that and opportunities to grow closer and so it's really rewarding to see parents be interested in taking advantage of those moments or realizing that a positive parent-child interaction doesn't have to be a big trip to a special event. You can reminisce about anything that happened during the day or the past couple of days and it's still just as good an opportunity to connect with your kids and I think those things are rewarding as well, especially because one of the things that we emphasize is helping parents talk with their kids about how did they feel better and how did the mom help the child feel better, and I think in a lot of cases, the parent didn't fully give themselves credit for all the things they did or think through all the things that they were trying to do and that's also kind of a boost, I think, and rewarding to see when parents also recognize like I do, I do have skills for supporting my children's emotions and here are the things that we did, and like let's talk about those. 
 
AS: It sounds like you could have done anything but, but you chose to help people in this way. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
 
KV: I just got really, really, really interested in thinking about mental health from a non medical model. That to me seemed more appealing than other fields which were less focused on relationships. And also thinking about how experiences play such a huge role in shaping our behavior and our biology and, if that's the case and it is the case, then what are the things that we could do in our environment for the better like, how can we enhance our environment or provide more optimal environments that can remediate some of those effects or lead to more positive behavioral and biological outcomes. So that to me was really, really exciting and something that I wanted to be a part of.
 
AS: You mentioned relationships. Why is it important to you to devote so much time to them in your work? 
 
KV: I think relationships are just so central. I think relationships are among the most meaningful things that individuals have and care about and motivate them. And so, what we know is that when folks are experiencing adversity, one of the best buffers against that adversity, is the relationships that they have and that parent-child relationship or as kids get older a close friend that peer/best friend relationship, mentors can be really powerful. I’m so fascinated by how relationships can have a major impact and influence - for the better - on individual lives. And so it seems worthwhile to learn about and invest in, how can we support these relationships, especially among families where there's a deep problem in those relationships. And so you know child maltreatment would be probably the worst situation for a parent-child relationship, and you know if we can make progress there you can you can make progress in all relationships.
 
AS: Some people are just sort of born into a situation that is so much more difficult. Because what I hear you saying is that you're educating the parent and you're educating the children, to a certain extent, so we have a great basis of education, but why is that so important? What role does education play?
 
KV: Like you said, there are different ways that we can educate kids and parents via early interventions, but the education system is a really great opportunity, in the same way, like you, could you could place kids in really optimal school environments and they have an opportunity in that context that they might not have at home, and so it provides a really great context to learn and grow, and can make a huge difference for multiple domains of functioning right? It's not just about like the content or the knowledge that's learned but expanding their cognitive skills and their emotional skills expanding their relationships and their social networks and support systems, and so the education system broadly can have the same huge major impact on kids' lives. It’s where they spend most of their time.
 
AS: Why is it important to you to help children be able to regulate their emotions? Why is it important for them and why is it important to you?
 
KV: Well, the ability to regulate emotions is just such a central developmental task that when you do it well can just open or enable the achievement of so many other developmental skills and tasks right, so my kids have good emotion regulation strategies they're able to pay attention better in school and get over a minor spat with a friend, it helps them form and maintain friendships it reduces risk for the development of psychopathology. So emotion regulation is one of the key things that we've identified in the literature as one of the biggest predictors of multiple forms of psychopathology whether it's depression or anxiety or conduct problems and substance abuse. So the extent to which we can tackle these things early, it just has such a huge potential capacity to prevent these negative developmental trajectories and instead provide kids with skills that are going to help them achieve additional things that will be helpful for their success down the road, right? So better emotion regulation skills means better friendships and peer relationships and better success in school and so that's an important thing to me to focus on and to try to do it as early as possible in development to try to help kids get on some more positive developmental trajectories as soon as we can.
 
AS: Can we talk a little bit about resilience?
 
KV: Sure.
 
AS: Is that a word that comes up quite a bit in your work and why is that so important?
 
KV: Yeah absolutely I mean so kids who have experienced adversity, you know as we talked about are at risk, for a number of negative developmental outcomes, but that's sort of on average right, and so, when you look at kids who faced adversity some definitely develop problems and some demonstrate resilience and are really successful, despite the adversity that they've had so it's really important in multiple ways. One, it just really demonstrates to us that no experience is sort of deterministic of what's going to happen and it conveys a lot of optimism and hope and the other thing that's really important about resilience is that when we when we can study it and study kids who are doing really well, despite early adversity, or if they've overcome particular challenges it's helpful to try to understand what it is about them that help them overcome those challenges, and you know, can we create that or support that in other kids or cultivate that for others and help them to achieve similar success, and so you know resilience is a really important concept and and it's also a process right so it's not something that a kid has or doesn't have but it's a process of having been successful, despite a challenge and I think that that definition of it helps provide a lot of hope, both for individuals who are going through a hard time and for you know those who are interested in studying it and wanting to enhance resilience for kids who are facing adversity.
 
AS: Do you think it's nature versus nurture? 
 
KV: Nature and nurture both contribute incredibly to development and the extent to which kids experience different things, so the nurture part of it really makes a big difference, even in their biological development and so one of the things that i've been - just as an example - i've been really excited about in our intervention work is that we know that experiences of child abuse and neglect can adversely affects kids stress physiology and you can measure that through cortisol. Stress physiology is important because not only is it important for regulating your emotions and coping on a day to day basis but those cortisol levels are also related to risk for physical health disease and things like that. But, studies have shown, including my own, that changing the environment, increasing social supports can also change kids' stress physiology. We were seeing a year later that kids were no different than non-maltreating families that we were studying and that's really helpful for also thinking about you know, preventing chronic diseases and problems with immune functioning and things like that so that's a really stark example of how nurture affects your biology and I usually you know I think most people come at it thinking it's nature or nurture or maybe nurture matters, but then once that happens that your biology is your biology, but it's still changing as well, through our experiences for the better or for worse, which is really exciting.
 
AS: Sounds like nothing’s set in stone.
 
KV: Yes.
 
AS: Good. That is hopeful.
 
KV: Yes.
 
AS: I like that idea. We always like to talk about some hopeful signs. But let's talk about challenges and successes overall for right now. Are you seeing certain challenges in your field? Obviously, maybe COVID has really brought other challenges to the fore. Can you talk to me a little bit about that landscape?
 
KV: Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges of the pandemic was just the increased social isolation and removing kids from their classrooms and those positive environments, especially for kids where their home life might not be great. I think that that is just such a huge loss for them even probably more so than kids who have really supportive family environments and lots of resources at home and so we believe that risk for child maltreatment has probably increased dramatically during this time. Calls to child welfare agencies went down. And you know I think that's because kids were not in school, so that the folks who are most likely to notice or be worried about kids are able to intervene weren’t able to get their eyes on those kids and they weren't coming to the attention of authorities as soon as we would like and, instead, there have been an increase in more severe sort of cases showing up in emergency rooms in terms of injuries and things like that so that's a that is a big challenge, I think, in the child maltreatment field, right now, and I, as kids across the country are going back to school and coming out and interacting with other individuals more often, I think there may be more kids than you know, in a typical summer that come to the attention of child welfare agencies and authorities that are really going to be needed some services.
 
AS: Oh, absolutely. And actually you’ll offer those services for the well-being of other people. Why is this work so important to you?
 
KV: The work that we're doing is really important, because we are learning new ways and teaching families new ways to improve that key parent-child relationship among families where a parent-child relationship is, you know, is it is in big trouble.
 
AS: It sounds like you've made a real impact. You gave us that example of the lady who was like I didn't know he might not have the words.
 
KV: Yeah. 
 
AS: I mean that's huge.
 
KV: Right? Absolutely, and so we're really excited to see all the ways potentially that learning a few really brief skills, could have a ripple effect towards other really positive outcomes. And that mom also had talked to us about how she had one child participating in the study with us, but she was using these skills with all of her children. Trying to give her younger child some of these words that you know he didn't have before and we had created a sticker or a magnet for their fridge that had different feeling faces on it and then he would you know go to the feeling faces magnet and say, “Okay, this is how I feel today.” So we're really looking forward to more fully understanding the potential impact of this work.
 
AS: I love that - the feeling faces. I can only imagine that's a huge relief in their home.
 
KV: I think it's really helpful when kids are able to use their words, instead of showing you what their behaviors how they're feeling. And I think it's a lot easier for parents to connect and empathize with kids when they're saying how they feel. If it gets to the point where they're showing you with their behaviors oftentimes that's not a behavior that moms love to experience. So, in terms of you know empathy building it's it's and connecting with kids it's it's a lot easier to connect with them and have the same level of empathy as when they're able to you know sit and tell you I feel angry, or I feel scared. You can talk about why and I think that's really important for their relationships.
 
AS: Great. Do you find that maybe it's the older guys that might be like say nothing and keep it all inside - have their words but not to not to use them - do you ever see that?
 
KV: There are quite a few families who at the start of working with us did not see value in talking about negative emotions, sort of like doesn't matter move on, why would we talk about it, and I think some older kids also have had that similar attitude. And I think it's been interesting or helpful for families to talk about those emotions and have different opportunities to give it a shot and to think about why it might be helpful to not just avoid negative emotions, but to actually talk about them and talk about how how you're coping with them. Part of what we're doing is trying to help families think about what what their children need at this particular age and the stage in their lives, and so when their children more infants and toddlers they communicated their sensitivity to their kids through holding them and a lot of touch and physical proximity and those are some of the ways that you can communicate your compassion and care and sensitivity and as kids get older their verbal skills start to develop and this particular age it's really helpful for them to actually talk about emotions and talk about the ways that we can feel better, and you know that you can start to show your sensitivity as a parent through the words that you say, in addition to the physical behaviors that you engage in. And, and I think that especially for moms who we are working with them and their oldest child and maybe haven't thought about that quite as much, but when you look at kids who faced adversity some definitely develop problems and some demonstrate resilience and are really successful, despite the adversity that they've had so it's really important in multiple ways. One, it just really demonstrates to us that no experience is sort of deterministic of what's going to happen and it conveys a lot of optimism and hope.
 
AS: Hope. I like that and that actually sounds like a good place to wrap up and a good thought going forward. So, thank you so much, Kristin, for your time and all the wonderful work that you do and it's just been a pleasure.
 
KV: Oh Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed talking with you today.
 
AS: Thank you. Bye bye. And thank you all.