VoE - Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan === [00:00:00] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Babies are very challenging. So, one thing I'd say about working with babies is that when they're young, they have very little time that they can be attentive. And just in general, you know, we had assessments where the baby fell asleep. So, okay, we're gonna, are we gonna wait? Are we gonna come back? Are we going to, what are we gonna do? So, it's definitely a challenge. Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. David Staley: I am joined today by Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, Professor of Developmental Psychology at the Ohio State University College of the Arts [00:01:00] and Sciences. She is a nationally and internationally recognized expert on co-parenting, father-child relationships, and the transition to parenthood. She's a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the National Council on Family Relations. She also serves as the President of the Board of the Council on Contemporary Families. Dr. Schoppe-Sullivan, welcome to Voices. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Thank you. David Staley: So, you direct here at Ohio State, the Children and Parents Lab, and I'd like to start there. Tell us, tell us about the work of this lab. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yeah, so the children and parents lab is in the Department of Psychology at Ohio State, and it's a collection of graduate and undergraduate students under my direction, and we study the roles of families in the development of young children. In particular, we focus on social and emotional development of children, typically children zero to five. That's the focus. David Staley: Mm-hmm. I know one of the initiatives of your lab is the New Parents [00:02:00] Project, and I wanna do a deep dive here. Tell us, tell us about this project. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Sure. The New Parents project was launched in 2008, so it's been going on for quite a while now. At that time, with funding from NSF and NIH, we recruited nearly 200 couples in central Ohio who were expecting their first child. These were expectant parents, these were all couples headed by mothers and fathers, so different sex couples, and we followed them across their transition to becoming parents. So, we interviewed, surveyed, and actually, observed the couples interacting together during the third trimester of pregnancy, and then we followed up, initially, when their children were three months six months and nine months old. So, we repeated our interviews and surveys and, and we did observations, then, with the babies included. David Staley: And what did you learn, or what have you learned from this project? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: We've, we've learned a lot of things. The original goals of the study were really to understand the development of [00:03:00] father-infant relationships over the transition, because there's been less research in developmental psychology and other fields on the development of father-child relationships compared to the development of mother-child relationships. But, we were also interested in how relationships that fathers have with children's mothers may influence the relationships that they are able to develop with their children, how involved they are, how close they are with their children. So, we did more of a family study in that way, so, we studied mothers in addition to fathers and their developing relationships with their children. David Staley: How do you determine closeness, I guess, for lack of a better word? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Sure. Well, there are a couple ways. Really what we focused on in the initial part of the New Parents Project was the development of high quality parenting. So, one aspect of high quality parenting is sensitive parenting. Parent sensitivity is when parents are able to respond promptly and appropriately to their infants signals and [00:04:00] needs, and so that's one indicator we use. We actually video recorded fathers interacting with their babies and also mothers interacting separately with their babies, and then I train students to use a system for rating the quality of the father's parenting behavior, including his sensitivity. We were then able to look at what influenced why some fathers were more sensitive with their infants than other fathers. David Staley: What are the determinants? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Well, one of the factors we focused on in the New Parents Project is something called maternal gatekeeping. Maternal gatekeeping is mothers' efforts to either encourage fathers to be very involved in parenting infants and young children, to support their involvement, or to discourage them by criticizing them or monopolizing time with the infant and so forth. So, we found in the New Parents Project, with respect to maternal gatekeeping, we found that that is one factor that can affect how involved fathers are in terms of time and frequency of, [00:05:00] you know, doing things like reading with the baby or playing with the baby or changing the baby's diapers, things like that. But, also actually that parenting quality, the father's quality of his parenting can be undermined, for example, if his wife or the child's mother is critical of his efforts to engage with or interact with the, the infant. David Staley: Presumably, father-infant relationships are different from mother-infant relationships. In, in what ways? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: That's a great question, and actually I would say the jury's still out a little bit on the extent to which mothers and fathers are more similar than different, or they're more different than similar. Folks in my field have different perspectives on this issue. We do know that there are some average differences, but there is a lot of overlap as well. One difference that emerges later in infancy, toddlerhood, and the preschool years, is that fathers tend to engage in more rough and tumble [00:06:00] play with children than mothers do. So, they tend to do more things like, you know, play wrestling, play chasing games. So, some of the listeners might remember, you know, doing these things with their kids or having their parents, or maybe in particular fathers do those things with them. So, there are some differences that can be identified. David Staley: I know one of the things that you examined is how new mothers and fathers divide childcare. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yes. David Staley: What does, what does that look like? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Well, that's an interest of mine in part because many couples, especially couples in which both partners have careers and are working full-time for pay outside the home in addition to parenting children, many of those couples really desire to share childcare equally or relatively equally after having kids, but it really regularly fails to happen that way. And this is for a number of reasons, it's not just stuff internal to the family, of course, there are policies regarding, you know, parental leave and things like that, that aren't necessarily equivalent, you know, for men [00:07:00] and for women and so forth that can be influential as well. But, I was really interested in that phenomenon, like why would couples who, you know, want to share parenting more equally perhaps than their parents or grandparents did? Why do they fail to do it? And so, our research with the New Parents Project, these were all couples who were working full-time prior to the birth of the child, and were planning to go back to work full time within three months of the child's birth. Both partners are planning to do this; most all of them actually did do that, but there still were persistent inequalities in terms of childcare with mothers doing substantially more childcare than fathers. So, we demonstrated that too in, in our, in our data. Another interesting thing is that, in order to measure the division of childcare, we not only used surveys, typically this is traditional, you ask people, how many hours per week do you spend on X activity, you know, and you have a list of childcare activities. People are very bad at being accurate in that. All new parents think they're doing [00:08:00] tons and they're super overwhelmed, which is understandable because it's a very difficult, challenging, you know, joyful, yet challenging period of life. But, we found a striking disconnect between what people say on surveys and what we are able to glean from more precise measures and perhaps more objective measures, like a time diary. So, we asked the partners, mothers and fathers in the study, to keep detailed 24 hour diaries of everything they did, not just parenting, but working and sleeping and all these things, and then we were able to gauge their involvement in terms of minutes spent in various activities, and then compare that to their survey responses. And those don't always align, so. David Staley: So what explains that, what, that misalignment? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Some of it I think is just difficulty being accurate when you're asked to make a global judgment about how many hours per week you spend doing anything. It's hard, because you haven't really been paying attention. Also there's obviously variations from day to day and week to week that can play a role [00:09:00] as well. But, in our research, people's ideas about gender roles and parent roles also play a role. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So one example of a finding is that mothers, actually, in our study, felt like they spent fewer hours in paid work after their child was born, that's what they said they did on a survey, but when we actually looked at the objective data, they hadn't actually decreased the amount of time that they were spending in paid work. So, what that could reflect is that they feel like, you know, they're a mother, so they're expected to devote themselves, you know, to their infants, and they may perceive that the child is taking up more of their time, but that might not necessarily be true, if that makes any sense. So, I think, I think that parents' expectations have a lot to do with it. David Staley: Earlier you said that one of the factors here was parental leave. Say a, say a little more about that. What's the impact of, like, parental leave policies? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Sure. In the U.S. we don't have a national paid parental leave policy. David Staley: Hmm. [00:10:00] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: What we have is the Family and Medical Leave Act, which was passed in the nineties and guarantees, I think, it's 12 weeks of unpaid leave for caring for a family member or the birth or adoption of a child. But, there are also additional restrictions. You have to work for a company with a certain number of employees, and it's very hard for people to take unpaid leave. That is just very, very difficult. So, there are states for example, Wisconsin, New York State, California, that have implemented paid leave policies for new parents. So, there are state level policies that exist, but Ohio does not have such a policy, so the families in the New Parents Project took varying amounts of leave after the births of their children, largely depending on whether they could take unpaid leave, whether they had paid leave through their employer, those sorts of factors. And so, what we're able to do in [00:11:00] the study is track the amount of leave parents took, whether it was paid or unpaid, and we were able to look at how the amount of leave might have shaped developing family dynamics. So, one finding, for example, is I was talking earlier about maternal gatekeeping, so mother's encouragement or discouragement of father's involvement in parenting. And I should say that the idea behind that is not to put all the blame on mothers for whether or not fathers are involved or not with their kids, but to recognize that you know, i n many societies around the world, mothers are still the primary caregivers of infants and young children, and so the argument is that therefore they may have somewhat more control over that domain of family life. And so, what we found is that when fathers took longer leave from their paid work after the birth of their first child, that mothers actually did less gatekeeping, and their attitudes were more favorable towards the father's parenting and his involvement with the children. And [00:12:00] so, that kind of flips the script a bit, saying, you know, fathers bear some responsibility here too. So, fathers who are signaling to mothers that they are really invested in being more equal parents, then mothers seem to back off a bit and allow them space to, you know, develop their relationships with their kids on their own terms. David Staley: What about romantic relationships between parents, especially as they transition into parenthood? I think this is an area that you've examined as well. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yes. So, most of the couples I've studied have, and all the couples in the New Parents Project at the outset were married or cohabiting and romantically involved with one another, and in our study and in, actually, there's quite a literature out there that suggests that the transition to parenthood is a very challenging period for a couples romantic relationships. I mean, you can imagine endless reasons why. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: You know, you don't get enough sleep, there's not time for intimacy, you know, the children take so much time and energy. There's often parents, and especially fathers, [00:13:00] may actually lean into paid work because they feel like that's an important part of their role to help provide resources for the family. So our study and many, many others, suggests that couples perceptions of the quality of their romantic relationships decline over that transition. But, the interesting part is that's not true of everybody. So, there are some couples who maintain high quality, satisfying, romantic relationships and others who, who don't. So, that's where that literature is now in terms of trying to understand, you know, who are these couples and why are some people able to maintain high relationship quality even through a very challenging period for their relationship. David Staley: Earlier you had said that father-infant relationships are less examined, less studied in the literature. What, what explains that? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I think father infant relationships have received less attention in psychology, really, because of traditional views about parent and gender roles. You know, before mothers were really, you know, [00:14:00] flocking to the paid workforce in the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S., of course there have always been mothers that were working. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: But, before that big change and associated social change, the view of mothers and fathers roles was that they were very distinct. David Staley: Hmm. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And so, as social change happened in the U.S. and other places in the sixties and seventies, then there became more interest in fathers participating in parenting and childcare, and so that's when it really started. And prior to that, especially in psychology too, they're, you know, influenced by Freud, certainly lots of focus on mothers. David Staley: Still? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yeah, lots of focus on mothers. I mean, things are changing. There has been, over the course of my career, definitely an increase in research on fathers. Another reason there's less research on fathers though, is they're harder to recruit and retain in research studies. They are, maybe, working long hours, especially if you're talking about fathers that have lower levels of education or economic resources. They might be working multiple jobs. [00:15:00] It's, it can be hard to, to engage them and to keep them in your studies. So, that's one thing that I'm proud of that we've been able to do successfully in the New Parents Project and in other studies, is study fathers right alongside mothers and continue to engage them in, in the research over the long haul. David Staley: Hmm. Well, I'm interested in another study that you conducted, and my understanding is that this study has ended, but this is the Parents and Preschoolers Study. Tell us, tell us a little bit about this research. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So, that was the first study I did as a new Assistant Professor at Ohio State in terms of collecting data here, and it was a small study, but it was exciting because I got a federal grant to complete the study, which was, as an Assistant Professor, was a really amazing thing. David Staley: Congratulations. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: It was a small grant from NIH, but it was really helpful. The study recruited about a hundred mother, father couples with preschool aged children in Columbus, in the surrounding area. And we only followed them in that study for one year, but the goal of [00:16:00] that study was to examine how father's involvement in parenting was related to the quality of the co-parenting relationship between parents. In our research, the co-parenting relationship is the relationship that parents share with each other with respect to parenting children, and originally, the co-parenting concept came out of the literature on divorce, where it was recognized that if a mother and father are no longer married, there has to be some kind of plan, right, or some kind of arrangement, custody arrangement and things like that. And when there was some degree of shared custody, we would talk about that as co-parenting. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Since that time though, which was in the seventies and eighties, there's been an increasing recognition that even couples who are married or romantically involved, and they have kids, that they are still engaged in a [00:17:00] co-parenting relationship. They are still relating to each other in their roles as parents in a way that they didn't before they became parents. So, we took the concept of co-parenting and expanded it, really, to reflect dynamics that happen in married parent families or any families in which the parents are also romantically involved. It doesn't have to be something that only applies post-divorce. David Staley: So, you've, in a sense, redefined coparenting. Is this, this, is this, you, this...? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yes. I was part of it. It was not, no, it was not me. I was not the first person to do it, but in the 1990s, there were a few researchers out there when, this was when I was in graduate school, who had started talking about co-parenting in this way, and I, you know, got in on the ground level. I thought it was really, really interesting, and so I helped to, definitely helped to build that literature. David Staley: Well, speaking of that literature, you have a journal article, it's in press right now: Coparenting from Different perspectives and Associations with Child [00:18:00] and Family Functioning. Tell us a bit about this research. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Sure. So, this research uses data from the New Parents Project, and my two co-authors are one former Ohio State grad student who's now at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and another current Ohio State graduate student. And what we did is we took advantage of the fact that in the New Parents Project, we have really rich data on co-parenting relationships. So, we not only have mother's reports using surveys about the quality of their co-parenting relationship with the father and father's reports about the quality of that relationship with the mother, but we also have observations of co-parenting from video recorded mother, father, infant interactions. And so, I train students to rate the quality of those interactions, whether they're more supportive or whether they're a lot [00:19:00] supportive. And so, we combined that information using a quantitative analysis method called latent profile analysis. So, what latent profile analysis does is try to uncover groups in the data, and it's a really interesting way to look at differences or discrepancies between different sources of information about family relationships, in this case, co-parenting. So, you might think that mothers and fathers are always on the same page if you ask them independently about the quality of their relationship. Well, that's not true. And then, if you add in more objective observers reports, those are even less likely to be extremely coherent with what parents say themselves. And so, what we did is we subjected all that data to this analysis approach and uncovered different, different groups. And the most interesting finding was that there was a group of families in which both parents said that [00:20:00] co-parenting was going pretty well, but the observers ratings were lower. David Staley: Hmm. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And that group was actually the group that had, when we looked at outcomes a bit later, that had children that were struggling a bit in terms of their social emotional development. And so, I think that's probably the most notable finding there. So, observers must be seeing something that parents aren't, we're gonna follow up to try to figure out exactly what explains, maybe, how those different configurations of, or different sources of information about co-parenting relationships go together or fail to do so. David Staley: So, a few times now you've talked about using video. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Mm-hmm. David Staley: With these families. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. David Staley: So, are we talking about, like, one of your assistants standing there with a camera, are we talking about cameras that are placed around their dwelling? In what way are your, your subjects being videoed? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: That's a great question. So, most typically what we [00:21:00] do, and this could be done in the lab where we do have wall-mounted cameras, we have a setup, it looks like a living room, so we could invite parents in and they obviously have to give permission to be video recorded, all that stuff. But... David Staley: But this is not in their home, necessarily? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: We could, we've done it both places. David Staley: Okay. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So we can do video recordings in the lab, but in the New Parents Project, we did a lot of our video recordings in parents' homes, we would bring two tripod mounted cameras and set them up. The research assistants if, if it's possible to leave the room, they will do that. So yes, there are cameras on, but we try to be as unobtrusive as possible and let people just feel comfortable enough hopefully to behave as they normally would. One interesting development in terms of methods, since the COVID-19 pandemic, is that now we can do family observations on Zoom, and actually we're doing some of those right now where you give families instructions to [00:22:00] record themselves basically, and then it's more convenient for families and actually for the researchers as well, so they can record themselves doing some kind of interactive task that, you know, we instruct them to do. And so, that is a promising way, I think, of continuing to gather observational data and hopefully of diversifying, perhaps, the participants in studies that use that as a technique. David Staley: I hope you don't find this an impertinent question. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I'm sure I won't. David Staley: Do you think that there is a difference in outcomes when you have, you know, someone, an observer there with a camera on a tripod versus cameras, wall mounted cameras in a home versus cameras in a lab setting versus, you know, doing this over Zoom? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: The Zoom observations are so new, I don't know that we know that yet. I do think that being in a laboratory setting adds another layer [00:23:00] of strangeness to the whole endeavor that may affect parents' behavior. I think that, for that reason, I tend to prefer doing the home observations ,cause at least people are in their own environment. Now, in the New Parents Project, another reason we did home observations was because these are folks who are giving us their time and they have small babies, and we did not want to make them try to come to campus with their babies. And I think that helped us get a great deal of retention of the participants, because we really tried to think about what would be easiest for them. David Staley: As a researcher for you, is it challenging to work with babies? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Oh, sure. Yes. Babies are very challenging. So, one thing I'd say about working with babies and especially doing observations or doing any kind of interacting with them, any kind of assessment of infants or things like that, is that when they're young, they [00:24:00] have very little time that they can be attentive or, you know, honestly, not fussing, crying. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Eating, sleeping, needing a diaper change. So, any kind of task or observation has to be necessarily brief. So, for example, in the New Parents Project, when the infants were three months old, I said we observed them interacting with their mom, their dad, and both their mom and dad together. Those interactions were five minutes each. They couldn't really be longer. And as children get older, you can, of course, observe them or engage them for a longer period. So, that is one challenge. And just in general, you know, we had assessments where the baby fell asleep. So, okay, we're gonna, are we gonna wait? Are we gonna come back? Are we going to, what are we gonna do? So, it's definitely a challenge. David Staley: Why are you a developmental psychologist? Did you know when you were five years old you were gonna be a developmental psychologist? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: No, I definitely didn't know I wanted to be a developmental psychologist. I wanted to be an archeologist. [00:25:00] David Staley: Ah. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: For many, many years. David Staley: Excellent. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: But, when I was a senior in high school, I had the opportunity to take an advanced placement psychology class and the high school teacher who taught my class actually had a PhD in psychology. And so, it was a really great experience and that's what sparked my interest in psychology. I think my interest in families and parenting and child development came from a tendency, I think I've always had to just really be an observer of behavior, and I guess I feel like children are fascinating to observe and try to figure out how they think about the world, how they view the world. And so, I became interested in, in children, I think for that reason as well. David Staley: Has your understanding of the idea of the family changed, evolved over the course of your career? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: That's a really tough question. I think [00:26:00] that my take on the family currently is that it is the quality of relationships in families that is more important than exactly what parents do or don't do. David Staley: Hmm. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I think that, as a developmental psychologist, I have come to think that, you know, parenting trends come and go, but what the research consistently shows is that those close relationships where children feel secure in their relationship with their mother, father, whoever their parents are, ' cause clearly parent figures can be more than just mothers and fathers, and that's an important point as well. But, if they feel secure in that relationship, they feel loved, they will be able to actually explore the environment, to learn the things they need to [00:27:00] do because they know that they always can go to their parent if they're scared or hurt, it actually gives 'em the confidence to be able to embrace all the opportunities that their childhood and their life offers. David Staley: Hmm. Has any of your research informed interventions, programs, policies, changes that support families? Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: It's hard to identify specific impacts, but for example, my research on co-parenting and the transition to parenthood has informed the development of programs for expectant and new parents, and especially for expectant and new fathers to try to help support them across that transition. In my role as President of the Board of the Council and Contemporary Families, we actively work to get the latest research findings out to the general public. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And to [00:28:00] policymakers, about American families. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So, I spend a lot of my time helping researchers to translate their work for broader audiences, so it can have that kind of impact. So, yes, that, that is the main way that I take my own work and that of others who study families in the U.S. and we get it out there, in the hopes that it will influence policies that can be more supportive of families and children across the country. David Staley: Tell us what's next for your research. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Well, the, I think the most exciting thing going on right now is one of my graduate students is leading a follow up of the families in the New Parents Project. The children are now almost 15 years old. David Staley: Hmm. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And she is collecting survey data from the adolescents and their parents, and we're also collecting Zoom observations of discussions between the mothers, [00:29:00] fathers and adolescent children. So, we'll be able to look at how the kids are doing now, how their parents are doing now at, the kids are old enough now that we can get their perspectives on their parents' co-parenting relationship. David Staley: Oh, interesting. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Which is something novel as well. So that'll, that'll I'm sure, introduce another wrinkle that, you know, another perspective that doesn't necessarily align with what mom thinks dad thinks or the observers think. But, it's pretty exciting that we've been able to continue to conduct this unique study of Central Ohio families for so many years. David Staley: It's challenging to do these sorts of longitudinal studies, I've got to think that's a real challenge. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: It is really challenging, but I'm so glad that I've done it and that I continue to have students and collaborators who are interested in, you know, sharing the weight to try to you know, keep, keep such an interesting study going. David Staley: Hmm. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, thank you. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Thank you so much. Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and [00:30:00] recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.