Research

Family

The Culture and Care Lab

Facing rampant achievement anxiety and social stress, how can educators, parents, and counsellors promote children's academic learning and at the same time protect their mental health and socioemotional well-being? How do adults help children develop healthy attitudes towards competition so that they can achieve long-term success?

What we do?

In this lab, we investigate how to help young people develop the self-, social, and cultural awareness that is critical for them to be confident and competent individuals and leaders. We examine the risk factors, particularly the performance stress in children that is generated in our education system, through parental practices, and related to broader social, economic and historical processes that undermines children’s social development and harms their long-term mental health. We also develop intervention strategies and resources to promote the wellbeing of vulnerable children and families such as new immigrants and international students. The goal of our research is to identify ways to foster children’s social competence, cultural understanding, and emotional wellbeing in a competitive and multi-cultural world.  

Through research, we aim at:

  1. Identifying effective educational and counselling approaches to:
    • promote resiliency among school-aged youth for coping with academic and social stress;
    • promote children’s abilities for critical thinking, communication, and collaboration;
    • produce usable knowledge to inform and support stressed parents and teachers
  2. Examining cultural ideologies and assumptions related to child development and education;
  3. Challenging social structures that support hegemony and injustice in education and threaten children’s mental health and long-term development.

How we do?

  • Conduct basic and applied research on youth development and mental health in sociocultural contexts; 
  • Organize workshops to promote adolescents’ communication (oral and written) skills
  • Give lectures to local and international communities;
  • Develop educator and counsellor resources;
  • Consult on program and curriculum development
  • Provide workshops on parenting Asian children and youth in North America