Holly Brophy-Herb knows the research her team conducted regarding young children's social and emotional development will make a difference in the lives of families.
"There is lots of evidence that shows early development does foster (social and emotional skills)," Brophy-Herb said. "It helps to provide families support, so they can provide emotional competency and social skills."
The group, led by Brophy-Herb, an associate professor from the department of family and child ecology, shared some of her findings at the Society for Research in Child Development conference in the spring.
"At age 3, we looked at children's competencies as defined by regulating their emotions, staying on task during an activity, persisting in play and in tasks, and engaging with their parents in play and in tasks," she said. "Then we looked to see what their competency scores at age 3 had to do with how well they performed on academic assessments as they prepared to enter kindergarten.
"As it turns out, these social and emotional competencies at age 3 significantly predicted boys' and girls' receptive vocabulary skills and applied problem solving skills at kindergarten entry, even after controlling for other things."
This information came from their involvement in the national Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Study, which looks at Early Head Start families, especially their children, Brophy-Herb said in an e-mail. Early Head Start, or EHS, is a national, federally funded program that makes services available to income-eligible families and their children from birth until 3 years old.
MSU joined EHS in 1996, making the university one of 17 testing sites across the country, Brophy-Herb said. The information they presented at the conference came from an extensive data base from EHS.
In addition to the EHS study, other findings include testing the social skills of preschoolers in connection with family and classroom conditions. The findings were published in the 2007 issue of Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.
"The most interesting finding here was that kids who were dealing with a lot of stressors in their lives showed less social competencies when in class with other kids who were not very socially competent themselves," Brophy-Herb said. "This implies that stressed kids who are in class with socially competent kids may fare better."
Brophy-Herb hasn't gathered the information on her own, however. She has been surrounded by a team who has contributed to her research, including co-investigators, Esther Onaga, Millie Horodynski, Laurie van Egeren and Hiram Fitzgerald. Also part of the team are two doctoral students, Sara Dupuis and Erika London.
Van Egeren, director of the community evaluation and resource center in university outreach and engagement, worked on the Building Early Emotion Skills, or BEES project, which is a curriculum funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and was developed by Brophy-Herb's team.
The curriculum focuses on infants' and toddlers' social and emotional growth, which provides activities and lessons for parents and children to do together, Brophy-Herb said.
The curriculum is currently being put into use in six counties across the state.
"Children need to be ready for school," van Egeren said. "They really need to be emotionally healthy and be able to ask questions appropriately.
"The relationship between a parent and child is key to learning. A parent is the entire environment to a baby," she added.
