Media releases

• Brock-led research team gets $2.5-million SSHRC grant to study policies impacting diverse Canadian families

  Wednesday, May 27, 2020 | By Brock University

  MEDIA RELEASE: 25 May 2020 – R0093

  Parents working from home while caring for children or struggling to support their families while facing a job loss are challenges that have become achingly familiar to many Canadians.

  COVID-19 has shone a spotlight on services and policies that support, or constrain, parents as they care for and provide for their families, an area Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work and Care Andrea Doucet has been researching for decades.

  With a $2.5-million grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Brock University professor will be heading an international team of researchers to study how childcare services, parental leave policies and employment policies impact diverse Canadian families.

  The seven-year research program, “What is the Best Policy Mix for Diverse Canadian Families with Young Children? Re-imagining Family Polices,” will explore four key questions:

  • How are current Canadian childcare, parental leave and employment policies structured, financed and delivered, and what can we learn from national and international research?
  • What impacts do Canadian policies have on how diverse families live, work and care for their children and what can we learn from their lived experiences?
  • What approaches and data are needed to measure the effectiveness and inclusiveness of these family policies?
  • What is the best policy mix for Canada’s diverse families with young children?

  “This partnership aims to create cutting edge and accessible knowledges about these three key family policies in Canada: childcare services, parental leave policies and employment policies,” said Doucet, Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brock.

  The team will also develop innovative approaches to assess and measure “how these policies are designed for — and experienced by — diverse Canadian families,” including Indigenous, racialized, newcomer, single parent, LGBTQI2S and low-income families.

  “This research program was developed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Doucet said. “At that time, the development of inclusive care-work policies were deemed as urgent, in the midst of a socio-political epoch marked by ‘care crises’ and rising employment precarity, which have profoundly altered how people live, work and care for significant others, especially young children.”

  Doucet said the team’s project is even more relevant with the arrival of COVID-19.

  “The pandemic has revealed how intertwined our working and caring lives are; how important and ‘essential’ care services and care workers are,” she said. “Childcare has emerged as one of the critical issues to economic recovery in Canada and in many other countries.”

  Doucet notes that parental leave benefits, which are already marked by social class differences outside of Québec, may have to be re-envisioned in a post-pandemic world, which will be a focus for Doucet and team members with expertise in parental leave and employment policies.

  “Pre-pandemic, we acknowledged that there was a widening gap between families who had, and families who did not have, access to affordable childcare services, leave benefits and workplace supports,” she said.

  With Doucet as Principal Investigator, the research team is made up of 53 people (29 co-investigators and 24 collaborators), including Brock’s Kate Bezanson, Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean of Social Sciences, as one of the co-investigators. It also includes 34 partners from Canadian universities, non-profit organizations, international organizations, government departments, unions and a private sector company.

  The team’s lead community partner is the Childcare Research and Resource Unit led by co-investigator Martha Friendly, “who has championed childcare for nearly a half century,” said Doucet. In addition to Doucet and Friendly, the co-founders of the partnership are Donna Lero (University of Guelph) and Susan Prentice (University of Manitoba).

  The interdisciplinary research team includes four of Doucet’s current or former postdoctoral fellows: Sadie Goddard-Durant and Sophie Mathieu (Brock), Lindsey McKay (Thompson Rivers University) and Eva Jewell (Ryerson University), as well as one former PhD student, Karen Foster (Dalhousie University). The project will train more than 70 undergraduate and graduate students and several postdoctoral fellows.

  “The project is the culmination of three years of research consultations building upon three decades of team research and advocacy on childcare, and a decade of collaboration on parental leave and employment policies,” said Brock University Vice-President, Research Tim Kenyon. “With Doucet’s leadership, this research will contribute to Canadian policies that will support Canadian families’ caring and working lives, ultimately resulting in a stronger and more just society.”

  The seven-year project is being funded by SSHRC’s Partnership Grant program which supports formal partnerships between academic researchers and a range of community, non-profit, public sector, and private sector partners.

   

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews: 

  * Dan Dakin, Manager Communications and Media Relations, Brock University [email protected], 905-347-1970 

  – 30 –

  Categories: Media releases

• Brock expert says Fruit Snack Challenge makes parents researchers

  Thursday, May 21, 2020 | By Brock University

  MEDIA RELEASE: 21 May 2020 – R0092

  As parents around the world find new activities to keep their children busy at home, a popular online challenge has caught the attention of a Brock University expert.

  Associate Professor of Psychology Caitlin Mahy says the rise of the Fruit Snack Challenge on social media, which sees parents secretly filming their children as they are left alone with snacks under the instructions not to eat them, is bringing longstanding psychological research practices into the homes of people around the world.

  “By filming the challenge, parents are doing something with kids that developmental psychologists have been studying for more than four decades,” she says. “It’s really neat that parents are playing the role that a developmental scientist usually plays, albeit observing many fewer children.”

  Though the viral videos are done in fun, Mahy says the experiment they are emulating has been used for scholarly psychological research that has produced telling statistics.

  “The Fruit Snack Challenge is almost exactly the same as Walter Mischel’s infamous marshmallow test where children were told they could have one marshmallow immediately or wait 15 minutes and get two marshmallows,” she says. “This task was used to measure children’s delay of gratification, and in his work he showed that children who waited longer (who could resist temptation) experienced many positive, long-term outcomes including higher incomes, higher rates of educational achievement, and were even less likely to be incarcerated.”

  With these findings in mind, as well as her own research into the way different wording or whether a child takes their own or an adult’s perspective can influence the results, Mahy says there’s no need for parents to panic if their child does not pass the at-home test.

  “I would encourage parents not to worry too much if their child ‘fails’ the task, as this ability develops significantly between three and six years of age and many children develop these self-regulatory abilities as they mature,” she says.

  Though parents won’t be able to effectively gauge their child’s future income or likelihood of incarceration from the short experiments, Mahy says there are some key takeaways.

  “Every child is different,” she says. “Researchers study individual differences in the lab, but these videos show us that some children wait, others don’t, and those who do wait use a variety of strategies to help them.”

  It’s also clear that parents love to watch their children respond in novel situations.

  “I hope this encourages parents to participate in child development studies in the future when they have the exact same opportunity to see how children respond to various tests in the lab,” she says.

  As she scrolls through the videos, Mahy thinks her own children could be the next participants in the informal challenge.

  “It would be fun,” she says. “I am pretty sure my almost four-year-old would pass with flying colours, but my 16-month-old, who doesn’t yet have the pre-requisite self-control or language abilities, would probably just gobble up the fruit snacks right away.”

  Associate Professor of Psychology Caitlin Mahy is available for interviews.

   

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews: 

  * Dan Dakin, Manager Communications and Media Relations, Brock University [email protected] or 905-347-1970

  – 30 –

  Categories: Media releases