We will start the review for this position in a couple of days!
08.12.2025 17:55
👍 12
🔁 3
💬 0
📌 0
We will start the review for this position in a couple of days!
Happy to share our review "Investigating hierarchical critical periods in human neurodevelopment” in @npp-journal.bsky.social! We examine neurobiological, environmental & behavioral evidence for human critical periods in sensory and association cortex +discuss new research directions rdcu.be/eMkVU 🧵
Thanks, Arielle!
So many more questions than answers here, but I think this work highlights the large variability among kids in poverty, and the complexities of being deemed successful in a society that was not built for them to succeed. So happy to see Selina’s hard work out in the world!
figure showing a positive relation between lfpn-dmn connectivity and internalizing symptoms for children above poverty in particular. from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2025.101618
Interestingly, she found that high LFPN-DMN connectivity was linked to worse mental health for children in poverty—and that it even predicted worse mental health one year later. It suggests maybe the same pattern of brain activity that helps these kids succeed also puts them at risk.
graph showing the association between children’s school grades and their internalizing symptoms. as letter grades decrease, internalizing symptoms increase for children both above and below poverty, with effects more pronounced for children below poverty. from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2025.101618
Selina found that 9-10 year-old kids in poverty who had high grades also had better mental health concurrently, but grades were not predictive of future mental health issues.
figure with potential hypotheses. For children in families above poverty, we predicted that higher grades in school would be linked to fewer internalizing symptoms, and higher LFPN-DMN connectivity would be linked to more internalizing symptoms, in line with past studies. For children in families below poverty, we predicted that tested effects could go in either direction, as indicated by lines of both colors and a question mark. from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2025.101618
Worryingly, this pattern of high LFPN-DMN coupling—seemingly adaptive for kids in poverty—has also previously been associated with mental health issues. So Selina wondered: is this also true for kids in poverty? Is something different going on, or is this still a risk factor?
Perhaps kids in poverty who succeed academically have to invoke different kinds of thought patterns to overcome academic structures that were not built for them. For example, creative thinking, future planning, even some forms of complex social reasoning likely rely on LFPN-DMN coupling.
figure showing a depiction of lfpn and dmn on the left, and a plot with an interaction between lfpmn-dmn connectivity and poverty status in predicting cognitive test scores. from https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27336-y
We’ve previously found that kids in poverty who are high-performers on these tests and in school are more likely to show higher neural coupling between the LFPN (goal-directed processing) and the DMN (thoughts outside of the here-and-now). This was surprising—it’s the opposite of high-income kids.
graph with income on the x-axis and summed cognitive test scores on the y-axis, showing huge variation in test performance at each income bin. from https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27336-y
Kids in poverty are often talked about as if they are a monolithic group, but of course we know that’s not true. Even when looking at their test scores on standardized cognitive measures alone (an arguably biased metric), there’s huge variation in how they do.
Very excited to share a new paper led by my amazing former honors student, @pach-selina.bsky.social, with Silvia Bunge.
Selina asked: for kids living in poverty who are high-performers in school, are there downstream mental health risks?
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Thank you so much for all of your interest in the Journal of Black Language and Culture. Please join us for our introductory webinar on Friday, November 7, 2025 | 6-7:30 p.m. ET. A link to register is here: www.lsadc.org/ev_calendar_...
🚨 New publication! Our registered report in Journal of Educational Psychology examines whether common executive function (EF) tasks demonstrated measurement invariance across racial/ethnic groups. Spoiler: they don’t. ⚠️
doi.org/10.1037/edu0...
I’m hiring!! 🎉 Looking for a full-time Lab Manager to help launch the Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab at Stanford. We’ll use all-day language recording, eye tracking, & neuroimaging to study how kids & families navigate unequal structural constraints. Please share:
phxc1b.rfer.us/STANFORDWcqUYo
New in @pnas.org.
Preschool teachers were less likely to accept participation attempts by children from working-class backgrounds, regardless of their perceived language level.
With a great team: @andreicimpian.bsky.social @sebastiengoudeau.bsky.social & Louise Goupil.
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Shameless plug that I'm on the job market! As a postdoc at Stanford's Center on Early Childhood, I study how children navigate growing up in poverty, w/ attention to both the challenges they face & the adaptive strengths they develop. To learn more & download my CV, see www.meriahdejoseph.com
Preschoolers Selectively Attend to Speech That They Can Learn More From by @ruthefoushee.bsky.social and colleagues
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Happy to share "The Dynamics of Caregiver Unpredictability Shape Moment-to-Moment Infant Looking During Dyadic Interaction," out now in Child Development thanks to a large team of people I worked on this with! srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...
It is surreal to join the GSE, which I have admired since my undergrad years, and the SCEC, which is on the frontiers of well-rounded, community-driven science.
And as someone who struggled with living away from outside-of-work community, moving back to my people is the greatest gift 💝
So so much of this can be attributed to my luck in having the most thoughtful, supportive mentors: Mahesh Srinivasan, Silvia Bunge, Ari Eason, @apmackey.bsky.social, and so many more formal and informal over the years. I aspire to do for others a fraction of what they’ve done for me.
Monica wearing black jacket and black baseball cap with Stanford logo (and if you look closely into the background you can see this is cropped from a shot at an amusement park 😅)
Over the moon to share that I will be starting my own lab as an Assistant Professor at Stanford GSE this fall, building out the Stanford Center on Early Childhood.
Excited does no justice to what I feel—this is a dream job in the place where most of my community is, and that feels most like home.
(IN 1 HOUR): "Applying a critical lens to strengths-based developmental frameworks" with @mellwoodlowe.bsky.social @meriahdejoseph.bsky.social @damcotto.bsky.social Deena presents: "Community perspectives on strengths-based developmental research: A qualitative inquiry" (2/4)
Great conversation about caregiving with Ann-Marie Slaughter on this mornings KQED forum.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a...
You can read the special Daedalus issue too here.
www.amacad.org/daedalus/soc...
Are you or anyone you know struggling to find and maintain an affordable and reliable childcare arrangement? You're not alone!
Read more about it in my newly published paper with Phil Fisher and Sihong Liu! (thread below)
doi.org/10.1111/cch....
Disappeared Tufts Human Dev. PhD student Rumesya Ozturk is also a graduate of Teachers College - she’s a dev. psychologist studying children’s media & prosocial development. She also bakes without recipes and binge-watches cartoons. She is our colleague & she was abducted on the street w/ our tax $.
tagging @meriahdejoseph.bsky.social who is here now 🤩
Thanks Victoria 🥰
Read the other amazing papers in this special issue, including by @alisongopnik.bsky.social @mlevi.bsky.social
@ashleyjthomas.bsky.social @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social @sethpollak.bsky.social @eschwitz.bsky.social @slaughteram.bsky.social @gregggonsalves.bsky.social @akapczynski.bsky.social & many more!
In popular narratives, parents in poverty are blamed for the perpetuation of poverty — overlooking the societal structures that made them poor in the first place. Respecting poor parents and their decisions points us toward the role society has in eliminating poverty. Read here: tinyurl.com/mrkp7yu6
An underlying assumption is often that appeals to authority are harsh. Indeed, white upper-middle-class parents often prefer to give choices or allow for negotiation on disciplinary issues, and only appeal to authority as a last resort. But for parents in some contexts, appeals to authority may be more aligned with warmth and care. For example, Black children are much more likely than white children to face a set of systems and societal structures that do not work for them, limiting their safety and opportunity as a result of historical legacies of slavery and racist policy.42 In these contexts, children must learn how to contend with injustice, so their parents may be offering care by steadfastly ensuring their obedience. Supporting the idea that children are sensitive to caregivers' intent and not just their actions, a study of Latine teenagers growing up in more violent neighborhoods found they actually viewed less authoritarian parenting as worse parenting, since it failed to respond to the lack of safety in their environments.
Women are also well aware of the health disparities their communities face, and might prefer to have children at a younger age, considering their own health prospects: My 34-year-old sister is dying of cancer. Good thing her youngest child is 17 and she seen her grow up. My 28- and 30-year-old sisters got the high blood and sugar. The 30-year-old got shot in a store. She has a hole in her lung and her arm paralyzed. Good thing she had Consuela long ago. My 28-year-old sister wants a baby so bad. She had three miscarriages and two babies dead at birth.22 As this poignant quote makes clear, the decision to have children early is not always driven simply by stress or disinvestment. Rather, in certain cases, it is a practical, strategic choice given the context. 23
Moreover, literacy-focused activities sometimes look different in lower-SES homes. To capture a child's home literacy environment, some common measures encourage researchers to count the number of books or magazines in a child's home.27 Yet one scholar who grew up with a lower SES reflected on how many other ways her family promoted literacy outside of books: from playing Scrab-ble, to cocreating verbal narratives, to learning to read through prayer and Bible study.28 Thus, while families in many low-income neighborhoods have systematically fewer access to books in their surrounding area, they may find other ways to promote the kinds of skills that are valued in school.29
We delve into issues like authoritarian parenting, preparation for literacy, language use, and decisions about when to conceive. These can look different for different families, and we explore how the literature sometimes mischaracterizes the choices of low-income families as maladaptive.