This Science video features Dr. Charissa Cheah, Professor of Psychology, whose new research explores the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Asian-American children and teens, with the intention of discovering their changes in emotions and behaviors as a result of the crisis and how adults can help them as the pandemic unfolds.
Children of the pandemic: How will kids be shaped by the coronavirus crisis?
(April 30, 2020; Joel Goldberg, producer/editor)
Charissa Cheah, a psychologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is recalibrating her research on how Chinese and Korean American children in the state cope with discrimination. With money from the National Science Foundation, which is working to quickly fund coronavirus-related research, she’s surveying several hundred families she has studied over the past 5 years. She’s also expanding to families elsewhere in the country. She’s hoping to learn how parents and children are responding to anti-Asian discrimination that has surged with the virus, and what broader lessons it might hold about these dynamics. “I did see [the pandemic] creating, I wouldn’t say opportunity, but a unique context in order to understand how some of these processes work,” she says. –Science magazine (April 8, 2020)
Dr. Cheah also was featured in a webinar, co-sponsored by SRCD’s Asian Caucus, that gave parents, caregivers, and educators a chance to ask child development experts pressing questions on how to support Asian and Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) children during the coronavirus pandemic. The event was moderated by Laura L. Namy, Executive Director of the Society for Research in Child Development. For additional resources related to supporting Asian/Asian American children and youth, visit www.bit.ly/SRCDAAPIWebinar.