Monica Ellwood-Lowe
@mellwoodlowe.bsky.social
1.1K followers 570 following 16 posts
Developmental psychologist. Nerding out about language & brain development, and the reproduction of inequity. Assistant Professor at Stanford GSE
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Reposted by Monica Ellwood-Lowe
damcotto.bsky.social
🚨 New publication! Our registered report in Journal of Educational Psychology examines whether common executive function (EF) tasks demonstrated measurement invariance across racial/ethnic groups. Spoiler: they don’t. ⚠️
doi.org/10.1037/edu0...
APA PsycNet
doi.org
mellwoodlowe.bsky.social
I’m hiring!! 🎉 Looking for a full-time Lab Manager to help launch the Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab at Stanford. We’ll use all-day language recording, eye tracking, & neuroimaging to study how kids & families navigate unequal structural constraints. Please share:
phxc1b.rfer.us/STANFORDWcqUYo
Research Coordinator, Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab in Graduate School of Education, Stanford, California, United States
The Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) seeks a full-time Research Coordinator (acting lab manager) to help launch and coordinate the Minds,.....
phxc1b.rfer.us
Reposted by Monica Ellwood-Lowe
lewisdoyle.bsky.social
New in @pnas.org.

Preschool teachers were less likely to accept participation attempts by children from working-class backgrounds, regardless of their perceived language level.

With a great team: @andreicimpian.bsky.social @sebastiengoudeau.bsky.social & Louise Goupil.

doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Reposted by Monica Ellwood-Lowe
meriahdejoseph.bsky.social
Shameless plug that I'm on the job market! As a postdoc at Stanford's Center on Early Childhood, I study how children navigate growing up in poverty, w/ attention to both the challenges they face & the adaptive strengths they develop. To learn more & download my CV, see www.meriahdejoseph.com
Meriah L. DeJoseph, PhD
www.meriahdejoseph.com
mellwoodlowe.bsky.social
It is surreal to join the GSE, which I have admired since my undergrad years, and the SCEC, which is on the frontiers of well-rounded, community-driven science.

And as someone who struggled with living away from outside-of-work community, moving back to my people is the greatest gift 💝
mellwoodlowe.bsky.social
So so much of this can be attributed to my luck in having the most thoughtful, supportive mentors: Mahesh Srinivasan, Silvia Bunge, Ari Eason, @apmackey.bsky.social, and so many more formal and informal over the years. I aspire to do for others a fraction of what they’ve done for me.
mellwoodlowe.bsky.social
Over the moon to share that I will be starting my own lab as an Assistant Professor at Stanford GSE this fall, building out the Stanford Center on Early Childhood.

Excited does no justice to what I feel—this is a dream job in the place where most of my community is, and that feels most like home.
Monica wearing black jacket and black baseball cap with Stanford logo (and if you look closely into the background you can see this is cropped from a shot at an amusement park 😅)
Reposted by Monica Ellwood-Lowe
arigard.bsky.social
(IN 1 HOUR): "Applying a critical lens to strengths-based developmental frameworks" with @mellwoodlowe.bsky.social @meriahdejoseph.bsky.social @damcotto.bsky.social Deena presents: "Community perspectives on strengths-based developmental research: A qualitative inquiry" (2/4)
Reposted by Monica Ellwood-Lowe
Reposted by Monica Ellwood-Lowe
ellroche.bsky.social
Disappeared Tufts Human Dev. PhD student Rumesya Ozturk is also a graduate of Teachers College - she’s a dev. psychologist studying children’s media & prosocial development. She also bakes without recipes and binge-watches cartoons. She is our colleague & she was abducted on the street w/ our tax $.
mellwoodlowe.bsky.social
In popular narratives, parents in poverty are blamed for the perpetuation of poverty — overlooking the societal structures that made them poor in the first place. Respecting poor parents and their decisions points us toward the role society has in eliminating poverty. Read here: tinyurl.com/mrkp7yu6
mellwoodlowe.bsky.social
We delve into issues like authoritarian parenting, preparation for literacy, language use, and decisions about when to conceive. These can look different for different families, and we explore how the literature sometimes mischaracterizes the choices of low-income families as maladaptive.
An underlying assumption is often that appeals to authority are harsh. Indeed, white upper-middle-class parents often prefer to give choices or allow for negotiation on disciplinary issues, and only appeal to authority as a last resort. But for parents in some contexts, appeals to authority may be more aligned with warmth and care. For example, Black children are much more likely than white children to face a set of systems and societal structures that do not work for them, limiting their safety and opportunity as a result of historical legacies of slavery and racist policy.42 In these contexts, children must learn how to contend with injustice, so their parents may be offering care by steadfastly ensuring their obedience. Supporting the idea that children are sensitive to caregivers' intent and not just their actions, a study of Latine teenagers growing up in more violent neighborhoods found they actually viewed less authoritarian parenting as worse parenting, since it failed to respond to the lack of safety in their environments. Women are also well aware of the health disparities their communities face, and might prefer to have children at a younger age, considering their own health prospects:
My 34-year-old sister is dying of cancer. Good thing her youngest child is 17 and she seen her grow up. My 28- and 30-year-old sisters got the high blood and sugar. The 30-year-old got shot in a store. She has a hole in her lung and her arm paralyzed. Good thing she had Consuela long ago. My 28-year-old sister wants a baby so bad. She had three miscarriages and two babies dead at birth.22
As this poignant quote makes clear, the decision to have children early is not always driven simply by stress or disinvestment. Rather, in certain cases, it is a practical, strategic choice given the context. 23 Moreover, literacy-focused activities sometimes look different in lower-SES homes. To capture a child's home literacy environment, some common measures encourage researchers to count the number of books or magazines in a child's home.27 Yet one scholar who grew up with a lower SES reflected on how many other ways her family promoted literacy outside of books: from playing Scrab-ble, to cocreating verbal narratives, to learning to read through prayer and Bible study.28 Thus, while families in many low-income neighborhoods have systematically fewer access to books in their surrounding area, they may find other ways to promote the kinds of skills that are valued in school.29
mellwoodlowe.bsky.social
In our essay with @greyes.bsky.social, Meriah DeJoseph, and Willem Frankenhuis, we argue that forms of parenting more common in poverty, many of which are highly racialized and stigmatized, are often adaptive, carefully thought-out responses to raising a child under intense constraints.
Screenshot, text below:

Caring for Children in Lower-SES Contexts: Recognizing Parents' Agency, Adaptivity & Resourcefulness

Monica E. Ellwood-Lowe, Gabriel Reyes, Meriah L. DeJoseph & Willem E. Frankenhuis

From public policy to the social sciences, parenting in low-resource contexts is often viewed through a lens of deficit: there is a focus on what parents should be doing differently. We challenge this idea, highlighting the deliberate and rational choices parents with low socioeconomic status often make to navigate their circumstances and give their children the best lives possible under significant constraints. These parenting decisions may go beyond simply ensuring children's survival in harsh con-texts. In some cases, they might give children the best shot at upward mobility. This view broadens our scientific understanding of good care, and implies that children may be best served when resources are spent on meeting families' needs, rather than instructing parents on how to care.
Reposted by Monica Ellwood-Lowe
ashleyjthomas.bsky.social
New Daedalus issue on the science of caregiving. In our paper, we ask, how might infants experience caregiving? Writing this paper with Christina Steele,
@alisongopnik.bsky.social and @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social was incredibly fun. Our paper and the other awesome pieces here:

www.amacad.org/daedalus
Daedalus Home
Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
www.amacad.org
Reposted by Monica Ellwood-Lowe
deborahb.bsky.social
From a journalist friend: Just spreading the word. The CDC is purging data, so people should archive their favorite CDC datasets today, namely ones around race/ethnic diversity, LGBTQ, and reproductive health. Also health data involving climate. The youth risk behavior survey has already gone down.
Reposted by Monica Ellwood-Lowe
carlbergstrom.com
This is not business as usual.

It’s not just a change in funding priorities going forward; it is the reneging on funding agreements and is profoundly disruptive for even those grants that will be found to be compliant.

Meanwhile, trainees who often live paycheck to paycheck are going unpaid.
EXCLUSIVE: NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with Trump’s orders
Grantee accounts remain frozen, while union accuses NSF of ignoring rules governing peer review
www.science.org
Reposted by Monica Ellwood-Lowe
Reposted by Monica Ellwood-Lowe
betsysneller.bsky.social
Okay, buckle up bsky, it's time for the Tale of the Bunny Paper.

Here's the imported thread from twitter where the search all started:

bsky.app/profile/bets... (1/n)
betsysneller.bsky.social
Bill Labov died this morning. I'm not coherent enough to talk about how important and influential and brilliant he was. I am very sad.

I was so lucky to know him, and I am grateful every day that he (and Gillian, and Walt, etc) built an academic field where kindness is expected.