Apr. 14, 2025
Josselyn Alvarenga, a second-year doctoral student in the COE’s Counseling Psychology program, is passionate about supporting healthy child development in marginalized families. Her research looks at how culture shapes the ways in which young children learn to handle and show their emotions.
Focusing on Black and Latinx families, Alvarenga looks at how parents and caregivers respond to their child’s distress, the child’s feelings of closeness and security with their caregivers, and how the child manages stress. She hopes that her research and the research of others within the Hands and Hearts Together project where she works, will promote wide-scale changes that positively impact family relationships and behaviors in these communities.
A strong bond between a young child and their caregiver plays an important role in laying the foundation for children’s future health and wellbeing. This bond, or attachment, can be measured as the level of connection and safety young children feel with their parent or caregiver. As the director of the CARE Lab at Lehigh, Susan Woodhouse and her team study caregiving attachment and how children learn to manage and express their emotions. They then share this information to help parents respond to their children’s needs.
On March 25th and 26th, Giving Day + March Mania: Combined Challenge for Lehigh takes place. This 48-hour event impacts all areas of the student experience and challenges all members of the Lehigh family to demonstrate their support for the campus initiatives and causes they are most passionate about. Please visit the COE Giving Day + March Mania page to participate: