Center for Families

Harnessing the power of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends to improve our quality of life.

July 21, 2023

Globalization, Diet and Child Health in Three Latin American Indigenous Populations

Amanda Veile

This chapter provides an introduction to the nutrition transition and its effects on diet, growth, and health of very rural Latin American indigenous infants and children. Case studies are drawn from fieldwork in communities of Tsimane forager-farmers in the Bolivian...

July 18, 2023

Conceptual Considerations and Methodological Challenges to Measuring Food Acceptance During Infancy

Kameron Moding

Infant food acceptance includes separate but overlapping components: wanting, liking, and consumption. Recent evidence suggests that although these components are often correlated, there is variability in the sensitivity of these measures to detect differences in infants’ responses to target foods.

July 17, 2023

Verb vocabularies are shaped by complex meanings from the onset of development

Arielle Borovsky

Verbs and nouns vary in many ways – including in how they are used in language and in the timing of their early learning. We compare the distribution of semantic features that comprise early-acquired verb and noun meanings. Given overall...

July 15, 2023

International comparisons of the home mathematics environment and relations with children’s mathematical achievement

Robert J. Duncan, David J. Purpura

Home mathematics environment (HME) research has focused on parent-child interactions surrounding numerical activities as measured by the frequency of engaging in such activities. However, HME survey questions have been developed from limited perspectives, by researchers from a small subset of...

July 14, 2023

CFF welcomes Amanda Case as a faculty partner!

Amanda Case joins CFF as an Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology in the Department of Educational Studies. Research interests include how schools, families, and informal learning spaces can collaboratively support youth development. In particular, her work examines how ecosystems of...

July 12, 2023

Building the Parent and Child Math Anxiety Network model from empirical evidence

Sarah H. Eason, David Purpura

Math achievement is one of the strongest predictors of academic success and career attainment. While research has focused on cognitive factors that relate to math achievement, a growing body of literature suggests that affective factors like math anxiety also relate...

July 10, 2023

Temporal Patterns of Diet and Physical Activity and of Diet Alone Have More Numerous Relationships with Health and Disease Status Indicators Compared to Temporal Patterns of Physical Activity Alone

Elizabeth A. Richards, Heather A. Eicher-Miller

Daily temporal patterns of energy intake (temporal dietary patterns, TDPs) and physical activity (temporal physical activity patterns, TPAPs) have been independently and jointly (temporal dietary and physical activity patterns, TDPAPs) associated with health and disease status indicators.

July 10, 2023

Taxation, Lactation, and Validation: The Symbolic Power of Tax Law to Legitimize Breast Milk Expression

Elizabeth A. Hoffmann

In 2011, the Internal Revenue Service reversed a previous regulation that excluded lactation supplies, including breast pumps, from medical care tax benefits. This policy change was met with joy by some working mothers. Often torn between family needs and workplace...

July 5, 2023

When one’s partner wants out: Awareness, attachment anxiety and accuracy

Christopher R. Agnew

Can a person tell whether their romantic partner wants to break up and, if so, how is such accuracy associated with their own attachment anxiety? We examined these questions by proposing and assessing the construct of perceived partner dissolution consideration...

July 2, 2023

A partner-specific critique of mistimed and unwanted fertility: Results from an analysis of the 2017-2019 United States National Survey of Family Growth

Christie Sennott

Despite substantial critiques of retrospective measures of fertility intentions, researchers widely use the metrics of unwanted and mistimed pregnancies as tools for monitoring patterns and trends in reproductive health.