A conversation with experts from the Evans School of Public Policy, School of Medicine, College of Education, and the Department of Psychology about how children and families are doing currently in the (aftermath or waning days) of the COVID-19 pandemic, and what is needed going forward to address the impact of the pandemic on children’s health, social-emotional well-being, and academic outcomes.
How do human beings become caring beings? This presentation offers answers from research with young children, whose sensitivity to other people’s feelings increasingly drives their helpful assistance even as their understanding of ingroup-outgroup discrimination is growing. We also consider the social experiences that influence the tension between social exclusion and shared understanding in early childhood.
In this talk, Dr. Kanter – Director of the University of Washington Center for the Science of Social Connection – will review the science of bias and behavior change, including new research that emphasizes the important role mindfulness and acceptance practices can play in protest and antiracism efforts.
Recent discoveries from developmental neurobiology, child development, and trauma science had shown that harsh and unresponsive caregiving during early childhood resulted in disrupted stress regulation systems in the developing brain. In addition, stressful family and community environments had been linked to specific pre-academic, social and health challenges in preschoolers. In response to these findings, new approaches to child abuse prevention started to focus on the need to mitigate young children’s adversities through parent education. The science of resilience has effectively provided the blueprints for a “behavioral therapeutic vaccine” that could buffer the negative impacts of early childhood adversity.
Synchrony – the coordination of biological and behavioral processes between children and their caregivers during moments of social contact – provides the basis for social connectedness and charts a central process in the development of stress management, empathy, and the development of the “affiliative brain”.
