In collaboration with colleagues at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine, we are expanding our lifespan approach to understanding mental health. We have been following a large cohort since pregnancy, with repeated assessments across the peripartum period and into preschool ages. Our pregnancy assessments overlapped with the height of the pandemic, allowing us to characterize how the acute stressors associated with COVID-19 impacted the experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum among the mothers in our sample. We have used a range of measurement approaches, including questionnaire and report measures, observations of parent-child interactions, medical record data, and indices of environmental deprivation derived from zip codes. These data are allowing us to document specific areas of risk and resilience among families, which can lead to the development of more targeted and effective early intervention to improve the mental health and well-being of children and parents. 

Relevant peer-reviewed publications