Resilience and Homelessness
Ph.D. student Theresa Lafavor researches how children succeed in chaotic situations
Sometimes, the best research questions are the most personal. That’s the case for child development doctoral student Theresa Lafavor, who was inspired to study children who succeed against the odds.
Lafavor’s dissertation will examine how children succeed despite homelessness or similar challenges. But unlike previous studies that have focused on executive function, such as the ability to regulate behavior or to plan, Lafavor’s work focuses more on the social and the emotional.
For three and a half months, she and her colleagues studied families at two homeless shelters in Minneapolis as part of an ongoing study directed by Institute of Child Development Professor Ann Masten. They concentrated on children between the ages of 9 and 11 and gathered data related to family history, each child’s school progress, and social and emotional abilities.
“We’re evaluating things like their ability to read emotions in people’s expressions or asking them about hypotheticals, like why someone might bump into them while standing in line,” Lafavor explains.
In the process, the team is attempting to determine whether children who are more socially and emotionally developed are better equipped to succeed despite the difficulties of homelessness.
The question has real resonance for Lafavor. She was removed from her birth mother’s custody when she was two and a half and placed with a foster family that eventually adopted her—and that broke up when the couple divorced. “I was basically removed from one kind of chaotic situation and placed in another kind,” she says.
But Lafavor went on to earn her B.A. in child clinical psychology at Smith College, then worked at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. As she worked with children who struggled with autism and other behavioral regulation problems, she wondered how the strategies they were learning would work in less supportive environments. She also wondered why she had been able to thrive and succeed while others raised in similarly chaotic environments had different outcomes.
The question led her to the University for graduate school. After completing her dissertation this summer, Lafavor plans to begin a one-year internship at two of the University Medical School’s pediatric clinics.
But Lafavor doesn’t want to be a therapist, essential though that work is; her ambition is to contribute to the understanding that helps therapists help children. “I’m being trained as a researcher, not a clinician,” she says. “The connection between research and practice is what interests me and neither can function without the other.”
Story by Holly Dolezalek | May 2011
