This post is featured in my newly released newsletter, Exploring Care! You can subscribe for monthly emails here on care and parenting resources.

Welcome!

I decided it might be fun to try somewhat more real-time updates and conversations on care and parenting resources I’m sharing through a newsletter instead of just compiling resources on a separate website page. In the posts and email, I strive to be clear in what is my opinion and experience, and what is the resource summary, but if this is ever muddled to anyone- please let me know! I’m all for constructive accountability and I don’t want others’ work I share to be misconstrued. The posts will use gray highlight for source material summaries to distinguish that work from my own perspective. Conversations on these resources can be done in the comment section of this blog post, so any insights you have from the resource or my post are invited and encouraged!

This newsletter and resource curation is an experiment, a way for me to rediscover lost resources and explore new ones, and for me to hold myself accountable by updating you all. I am also now giving myself permission to mess up and even correct things down the line. A big reason for me being hesitant to do this in the first place was due to the idea, and fact, that I would and will mess up, but having this in mind as a guide (instead of as a hinderance) is helping me bring this into existence and be okay with the inevitable mistake! My posts will have updates if they’re edited for any reason. Any text that is bold and smaller than this is a clickable link to an additional resource. Click here! 🙂

Before we get to the good stuff, a disclaimer: I’m not a medical professional or therapist, and my scope of work and background is related specifically to in-home postpartum support, childcare, and child development. Most of my experience has been with children who do not have medical concerns and those who are not neurodivergent, to my knowledge. My MA in child development, and minor in early childhood mental health, is my highest level of education. I do not have kids of my own, so I know I can’t fully comprehend the parenting experience! I’m white and have worked mostly for and with white families, so there may be cultural context and nuance that might be missed and not applicable to your experience.

Now, onto the resource, and my perspective and takeaways! It covers:

The individual and their relationships, emotion and social research, science communication, and applicability to postpartum

Our first resource is an episode, “What We Do With Emotions”, from the podcast, Wisdom of the Body. The host, Heather Grzych, talks with Felicia Zerwas’, PhD, who is a social psychologist working as a postdoctoral researcher at NYU. In the podcast, Felicia provides insight into emotions and her research, and into how that research can be communicated. While the research and podcast don’t talk explicitly about postpartum or child development at length (although kids’ emotions and parents’ reactions are mentioned around the 20-minute mark and social norms in childhood and adolescence around 34:20), I think there are some important parallels and insights to these areas so I’ve also discussed them in this post. Also another disclaimer, I’ve been friends with Felicia for over 10 years, and I think the way she discusses the nuance and context of her research is a great example of talking and thinking about research and its use as a source. Plus, emotion research is really cool, too! She also helped me immensely in releasing this first post into the wild by being another set of eyes and reviewing it!

While I’ve summarized relevant podcast points below, it might be helpful to listen to it first since the following summaries and my perspective might be seen as supplemental. The episode has a lot more great detail.

Individuals and Relationships

What first stood out was that while we can think about and research emotions in one person, considering two-way and group processes are also beneficial and necessary. Heather and Felicia discuss this in the context of a social lens of emotions, highlighting how one might manage emotions and how others could help in managing those emotions and are in turn affected by the individual’s emotions.

Taking a relational approach was at the forefront of my minor in infant and early childhood mental health curriculum and is frequently a part of my postpartum work- while we can consider and support the child as an individual, we also have to consider the child in relation to their parent(s) and the larger societal and cultural contexts (see Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory as an example of a context model). The parent-parent relationship is also important in supporting the child. Support intervention examples that incorporate relationships include Child-Parent Psychotherapy and home visiting models like Nurse-Family Partnerships. Other forms of care that include parents and the family unit could also even extend to postpartum doula work and even other community supports like meal trains! Supporting children means also supporting their parents and caregivers.

Heather and Felicia also talk about social power in its relation to the workplace, and also mention it in terms of the parent-child relationship. For example, how comfortable are kids and parents when expressing emotions? Social norms in childhood and adolescence can also affect kids and teens. Other topics included authenticity and feeling a sense of safety and belonging. 

My takeaway: we don’t exist in a vacuum!

Research Communication

I’m bringing this next section up because I’m probably going to talk about it more later into the resource curation. So, what is research and how can it be talked about? Why is it relevant to care? There’s a lot that goes into research and science communication, so I wanted to discuss how Felicia communicates the nuance of her research so well.

Touching on the relational discussion again, Felicia describes how her research has “social power as reported by the participant”. When looking into how one views themselves through a measure like self-reporting, we know it doesn’t include others’ perceptions, so there may be pieces of the puzzle missing if we were truly interested in learning about the whole picture. Because of this, there are times when including other information sources, or measures, can help researchers better understand the “rich contexts” people are, and emotions occur, in.

She also highlights how more recent research has explored emotion suppression as being more nuanced than previously considered (I love how this shows we can build on past research!). For instance, in certain contexts, suppressing an emotion can be useful or adaptive and not always seen as detrimental, as described in the example of winners suppressing pride and others viewing that as positive.

Felicia’s other research includes emotion response systems and she talks about the process of accumulating and measuring data on experience, behavior, and physiology through participants’ and research assistants’ use of a continuous rating dial. This provides data that is different than can just be done with collecting data from self-reports. Although these measures are used in her lab, Felicia mentions how other researchers might decide to measure it in other ways since they view emotions differently. This serves as a great reminder to how one research study isn’t the final answer on a question or hypothesis, especially as research builds on past questions and will continue to do so. 

I think in the sea of information we are currently in, it’s important to have a better understanding of what people are talking about when they bring up research and sources in general. How many news articles, or headlines, have you read lately that discuss or mention research or a study? My sharing of this research and what was done well isn’t going to tell you how to read research or even news articles, or what explicitly to look for (or look out for), but is more of a practice in seeing how people, and researchers can (and in my opinion, should!) talk about research and its applicability, or inapplicability, to the general population. There are resources we can use to build this skillset, but that would be better for a later post. Or if you’re up for taking a research methods class, that would be ideal, but is more time-consuming than most might prefer! I took two introductory research methods courses, with one being developmental psychology, and my background with reading research is surface-level, from my perspective (there’s still a lot of child development methods in research that I don’t understand!), but it’s been an invaluable skillset to have in reading and knowing how much goes into research and science communication. The courses I took covered some of the language of research (i.e., causation versus correlation) and its written structure in articles, like the importance of its sections (e.g., methods, discussion, etc.), covering limitations, and the need for further research.

Additional Research and Postpartum Applicability

Additional topics in the podcast include research on suppression, and how this can be costly for whoever is suppressing the emotion, but not for the other people the emotion might be suppressed for or because of. Also, Felicia’s research shows that reframing what is happening to change how you feel (i.e., reappraisal) can be more beneficial when confronted with uncontrollable stressors, whereas dealing with controllable stressors is more beneficial, and being concerned with being happy is linked with negative affects. More commentary on the research on happiness can be found in this TIME article. Felicia also mentions upcoming research on parents’ beliefs around emotions, which I’m eagerly looking forward to!

While the research on uncontrollable and controllable stressors and concerns and aspirations around happiness do not explicitly study postpartum, the podcast reminded me a lot about how there can be prenatal expectations and contrasting postpartum realities or actualities. I’m also using the term “prenatal” here as a period that can be well before we’re even considering pregnancy. For instance, how does a teenager view parenting and children, and what was their own childhood like? How will that affect or influence how they want to and will parent? While pregnant, what does one think postpartum will look like? Feel like? What have you heard or read about how newborns behave? Parents can have a wide range of postpartum experiences and there’s a lot of commonality when it comes to things like newborn sleep (i.e., waking frequently the first couple of weeks- their stomachs are small!), so having a hard plan or expectations for postpartum may come into conflict with the realities of postpartum they experience after birth. Considering expectations and potential realities is a module that was important for me to include in my Newborn Care: Building Curiosity class to help expecting parents consider how we think of postpartum in the prenatal period.

Thanks so much for reading! I’m looking forward to diving into more resources for you all in my newsletter and you can subscribe here!

Felicia has provided her email, fz2338@nyu.edu, if there are any questions on her research, and you can find more of her publications at these links: here; and here!