The Family Study Center
CELEBRATES 20 YEARS OF RESEARCH AND PARTNERSHIPS
Carrie O’Brion
The center, now internationally recognized in the field of infant-family mental health, is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2023–24. In doing so, it is sponsoring a broad array of events for students, families and professionals throughout the year. These events are recapping some of the most important discoveries in the field of infant-family mental health over the past 20 years, bringing scholars from around the world to USF St. Petersburg and celebrating many of the FSC’s major collaborations, contributions and contributors.
ELEVATING THE CONCEPT OF “COPARENTING” The FSC’s work has been guided by two scientific discoveries: that the first three years of a child’s life are unparalleled in building healthy brain development and assuring
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Today, that viewpoint has changed dramatically. There is widespread recognition that adverse experiences during infancy and early childhood can have lifelong impacts on physical and mental health, and that families play powerful protective roles in the face of such adversity. This revolution in thinking is largely thanks to the pioneering research contributions of the Family Study Center (FSC) at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. Over the past 20 years, the FSC has played a significant role in raising awareness about the roles of families in the healthy development of infants and young children from newborns to age 3.
emotional security, and that these foundations for healthy development are shaped by infants’ and toddlers’ everyday experiences in their communities and social networks, with those who care for them. FSC research has shown that early infant mental health can be improved through the successful strengthening of relationships between children’s important caregiving adults, or “coparents.”
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The field of infant mental health was relatively unnoticed 20 years ago. Most discussions about mental health focused on the experiences of adolescents or adults, mostly due to a mistaken belief that infants were so young that their lives were relatively uncomplicated.
director of the FSC since its inception. “Looking at children and families worldwide, across all cultures, the vast majority experience caregiving support and form bonds with multiple individuals during the course of their young lives.” The Family Study Center sees coparenting as an “every child” concept, and the FSC’s research and programs are geared toward strengthening relationships and coordination among coparents who are raising children. The center’s work throughout the past 20 years has been influential locally, nationally and internationally in establishing and promoting this groundbreaking model.
RECOGNIZING THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF A SPECIAL CAREGIVER
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Coparenting is a child development framework that goes beyond a focus on just mothers and infants. It even goes beyond mothers, fathers and infants to recognize and understand the child’s emotional bonds with all caregivers contributing to their upbringing. In countless families through Florida, the U.S. and the world, grandparents or other relatives care for infants daily. Providers outside the family also care for young children sometimes up to 40 hours a week or more. For babies, such individuals function as coparents. “We take time to understand and support children’s families in whatever form the families actually take, without making judgments about how they ought to be,” said James McHale,
The events scheduled for the 20th anniversary celebration reflect the center’s commitment to strengthening coparenting in the families of infants and very young children. The event series launched in October with a presentation by Carla Stover of Yale University’s School of Medicine Child Study Center, who was a coinvestigator for the FSC’s “Figuring It Out for the Child” (FIOC) initiative. FIOC is a unique resource and referral program designed to support unmarried, non-coresident African American mothers and fathers having their first baby together. It is offered free of charge and unlike many federally and privately sponsored marriage and relationship enhancement programs, no present or future marriage or enduring committed romantic relationship is presumed. The presentation by Stover was particularly poignant as it paid tribute to Katherine McKay,
