Our Lab
Dr. Julie Braungart-Rieker – Director and Department Head
The Babies and Families Laboratory studies infant socio-emotional development and the extent to which factors in the family (maternal and paternal parenting, marital conflict and communication) contribute to infants’ well-being (e.g., regulation, positive affect, parent-child attachment).
The Babies and Families Lab is part of the The Department of Human Development and Family Studies in the The College of Health and Human Sciences at Colorado State University.
Current Research Projects
Families and Babies Study
Families and Babies Study Link
This project aims to help mothers and families in their role as parents and as partners. Positive parenting and parent interactions help support the healthy functioning of babies as they develop.
Funded By: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Description: Preventative interventions involving video-feedback programs to promote parenting have been shown to be successful in improving maternal sensitivity and infant-mother attachment security. However, interventions might be substantially more effective if broader elements of family systems were also addressed, including father-child and inter-parental relationships. Infancy is a particularly sensitive and vulnerable period not only for the child but also for the parents who often experience heightened daily stress, parenting demands, work-family role strain, and inter-parental discord associated with changes in the family. Our project is in collaboration with the University of Notre Dame and involves three phases. Phase I involves a lab and home pre-test (infants 6 months of age) and 8-week intervention period; Phase II (12 months) includes an initial post-test, and Phase III (16-18 months) involves a second post-test. Families are randomly assigned to one of four conditions: sensitivity intervention (SI), couples intervention (CI), both (SI + CI) or control. We are evaluating the effectiveness of the SI, CI, and SI+CI interventions at improving parental sensitivity, parental efficacy, parenting stress, inter-parental conflict, infant affective development, attachment security, behavior problems, and socio-emotional competence. We also test whether intervention effectiveness depends on initial characteristics of the families (e.g., parent depressive symptoms, demographic factors, infant temperament).
