Child and Adolescent Development (CAD)

The Child and Adolescent Development (CAD) content area focuses on understanding how to support optimal development for children and adolescents and their families. Our research focuses on understanding how environments support optimal development, designing and testing programs to foster development, and putting them into practice.

Our faculty expertise spans these areas:

• Adolescent health and risk-taking
• Early childhood education
• Emotion regulation
• Executive function
• Parent-child relationships
• Technology effects of development

Graduate students affiliated with the CAD area complete coursework that includes developmental theories, research methods and advanced statistical analysis, socio-emotional development, cognitive development, and parent-child interactions. The theoretically captivating research questions examined by the Child and Adolescent Development faculty have employed rigorous analytic techniques that have resulted in publications in top-tier academic journals, including Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Journal of Adolescent Psychology, and Social Development.

HDFS faculty across the focus areas of Adult Development and Aging, Child and Adolescent Development, Family Science, and Marriage and Family Therapy often collaborate on research and service projects. Graduate students often participate in research projects and subsequent publications through collaborations with HDFS faculty and faculty in other departments, such as Education, Psychology, Sociology, and Engineering. 

Many of our students work with one of the three centers that serve as living laboratories and community outreach spaces, including The Engagement Center for Creative Aging, Child Development Center for Learning and Research, and the Family Therapy Center.