A prospective study on the interplay between maternal mental health, early parenting and child development of self-regulation: A novel multidisciplinary approach.

Main Supervisor: Karin Brocki
Co-supervisor: Andreas Frick, Matilda Frick
PhD students: Lilja Kristín Jónsdóttir och Emma Jasperien Heeman

Lilja Kristín Jónsdóttir

What is your educational background?
I have a bachelor in Psychology from University of Iceland, as well as a masters degree in Social Sciences with a specialization in Psychology. I have also worked as a special education teacher, in both pre- and elementary school.

Why did you apply to WOMHER's interdisciplinary graduate school?
When studying a complex phenomenon, such as mental health and child development, interdisciplinary knowledge and collaboration is highly valuable. WOMHER provides opportunity for me to acquire interdisciplinary tools and knowledge, as well as the opportunity to network with other like-minded PhD students.

Tell us more about your research project?
Self-regulation in childhood is an important predictor of future mental and physical health, as well as other important outcomes, such as academic achievement. It is therefore important to try to identify early predictors of self-regulation, which may enable successful development of interventions for children at risk. Children’s early environment, in particular the early caregiving relationship, has been shown to play an important role in child development. In our project, we follow children and their parents from an early age, and use various methods to look for potential predictors of self-regulation and related abilities. Right now, my focus is on how aspects of the early caregiving relationship interact with child-intrinsic factors in toddlerhood in predicting self-regulation at school-age.

What do you hope the impact of this project to be?
My hope is that the project meaningfully contributes to the body of knowledge on self-regulation development, and thereby supports development of successful interventions for children at risk.

Emma Jasperien Heeman

What is your educational background?

My educational background is a bachelor and master degree in Pedagogical Sciences (specialization Forensic Child and Youth Care Sciences). After graduation, I worked as a clinician at a mental health care organization in the Netherlands for six years, where my daily pursuits and further education involved parent-child therapies, (neuro)psychological- and personality assessments, and counselling.

Why did you apply to WOMHER's interdisciplinary graduate school?

In order to understand child development, we need to address and study it from multiple angles and perspectives. One way in which child development may be shaped is through perinatal maternal mental health. Womher’s interdisciplinary graduate school will enable me to get a holistic, interdisciplinary perspective on child development and give me tools to study its relation to maternal mental health.

Tell us more about your research project?
My research project is part of a larger, multi-method longitudinal study (EFFECT) that follows children and their families over a longer period of time. The goal of the EFFECT-project is to identify underlying developmental mechanisms of typical and atypical self-regulation (i.e. the regulation of emotions, cognitive processes and behavior). Self-regulation capacity is an important predictor of mental (ill) health. Potential mechanisms by which self-regulation develops is through the dynamic interplay between the mother (e.g. perinatal mental health, her sensitivity towards the child’s signals) and intrinsic factors of the child (e.g., temperament, cognitive functioning). These contextual and child factors, and their interplay, are assessed within our interdisciplinary project.
Right now, I am looking at if the quality of contextual factors (e.g. maternal social and psychological resources, maternal sensitivity, and mother-child attachment) predict child emotion regulation capacity at 18 months.

What do you hope the impact of this project to be?
My goal is to conduct transparent, reproducible and accessible science. Furthermore, I hope that the results of our studies will inform future scientific research on child development and that they have practical implications for early prevention and treatment methods that foster both maternal and child mental health.

Other information, references and links
Publications
van Steensel, F. J., & Heeman, E. J. (2017). Anxiety levels in children with autism spectrum disorder: A meta-analysis. Journal of child and family studies, 26(7), 1753-1767.