Kari Adamsons

Last updated
Kari Adamsons
NationalityAmerican
EducationPh.D.
Alma mater University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Known for Family theory, Fathering, Couple relationship
Scientific career
Institutions University of Connecticut
Thesis The Effect of Congruence of Mothers’ and Fathers’ Beliefs Regarding Fathering Roles on Father Involvement (2006)

Kari Adamsons is an associate professor of human development and family studies at University of Connecticut. She is a nationally recognized expert on fathers, including father-child relationships, co-parenting, shared parenting and couple relationships. Adamsons is a co-author of Family Theories: An Introduction, a widely used university textbook.

Contents

Early life and education

As an undergraduate, Adamsons studied psychology, graduating in 1996 with a B.A. from College of William and Mary. Subsequently, she enrolled at the human development and family studies program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, obtaining first a master's degree in 2002 followed by a doctoral degree in 2006. After one year as a postdoctoral fellow she became a faculty member at the University of Connecticut in 2007. [1]

Scientific work

Adamsons is most known for her work on fathers and father-child relationships, especially during transition to fatherhood and during and after divorce or separation. She has shown that quality time with their non-custodial fathers is very important for the well-being of children whose parents have divorced. [2] She has further concluded that it is not only the quality but also the quantity of time that matters. [3] [4]

Adamsons other important research areas include family theory, identity theory, bioecological theory and couple relationships. [1]

Selected publications

Books

Scientific articles

Other

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Developmental psychology</span> Scientific study of psychological changes in humans over the course of their lives

Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, aging, and the entire lifespan. Developmental psychologists aim to explain how thinking, feeling, and behaviors change throughout life. This field examines change across three major dimensions, which are physical development, cognitive development, and social emotional development. Within these three dimensions are a broad range of topics including motor skills, executive functions, moral understanding, language acquisition, social change, personality, emotional development, self-concept, and identity formation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Parenting</span> Process of raising a child

Parenting or child rearing promotes and supports the physical, emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood. Parenting refers to the intricacies of raising a child and not exclusively for a biological relationship.

The concept of interpersonal relationship involves social associations, connections, or affiliations between two or more people. Interpersonal relationships vary in their degree of intimacy or self-disclosure, but also in their duration, in their reciprocity and in their power distribution, to name only a few dimensions. The context can vary from family or kinship relations, friendship, marriage, relations with associates, work, clubs, neighborhoods, and places of worship. Relationships may be regulated by law, custom, or mutual agreement, and form the basis of social groups and of society as a whole. Interpersonal relationships are created by people's interactions with one another in social situations.

Shared parenting, shared residence, joint residence, shared custody, joint physical custody, equal parenting time (EPT) is a child custody arrangement after divorce or separation, in which both parents share the responsibility of raising their child(ren), with equal or close to equal parenting time. A regime of shared parenting is based on the idea that children have the right to and benefit from a close relationship with both their parents, and that no child should be separated from a parent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Attachment theory</span> Psychological ethological theory about human relationships

Attachment theory is a psychological, evolutionary and ethological theory concerning relationships between humans. The most important tenet is that young children need to develop a relationship with at least one primary caregiver for normal social and emotional development. The theory was formulated by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby.

Judith Rich Harris was an American psychology researcher and the author of The Nurture Assumption, a book criticizing the belief that parents are the most important factor in child development, and presenting evidence which contradicts that belief. Harris was a resident of Middletown Township, New Jersey.

Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory. She designed the strange situation procedure to observe early emotional attachment between a child and its primary caregiver.

Relational dialectics is an interpersonal communication theory about close personal ties and relationships that highlights the tensions, struggles and interplay between contrary tendencies. The theory, proposed respectively by Leslie Baxter and Barbara Montgomery in 1988, defines communication patterns between relationship partners as the result of endemic dialectical tensions. Dialectics are described as the tensions an individual feels when experiencing paradoxical desires that we need and/ or want. The theory contains four assumptions, one of them being that relationships are not one dimensional, rather, they consist of highs and lows, without moving in only one direction. The second assumption claims that change is a key element in relational life, in other words, as our lives change, our relationships change with it. Third, is the assumption that, “contradictions or tensions between opposites never go away and never cease to provide tension,” which means, we will always experience the feelings of pressure that come with our contradictory desires. The fourth assumption is that communication is essential when it comes to working through these opposing feelings. Relationships are made in dialogue and they can be complicated and dialogue with similarities and differences are necessary. Relational communication theories allow for opposing views or forces to come together in a reasonable way. When making decisions, desires and viewpoints that often contradict one another are mentioned and lead to dialectical tensions. Leslie A. Baxter and Barbara M. Montgomery exemplify these contradictory statements that arise from individuals experience dialectal tensions using common proverbs such as "opposites attract", but "birds of a feather flock together"; as well as, "two's company; three's a crowd" but "the more the merrier". This does not mean these opposing tensions are fundamentally troublesome for the relationship; on the contrary, they simply bring forward a discussion of the connection between two parties.

Meta-emotion is "an organized and structured set of emotions and cognitions about the emotions, both one's own emotions and the emotions of others". This broad definition of meta-emotion sparked psychologists' interest in the topic, particularly regarding parental meta-emotion philosophy.

A gatekeeper parent, in legal setting, is a parent who appoints themself the power to decide what relationship is acceptable between the other parent and the child(ren). The term is broad and may include power dynamics within a marriage or may describe the behaviors of divorced or never married parents.

Mary Main was an American psychologist notable for her work in the field of attachment. A Professor at the University of California Berkeley, Main is particularly known for her introduction of the 'disorganized' infant attachment classification and for development of the Adult Attachment Interview and coding system for assessing states of mind regarding attachment. This work has been described as 'revolutionary' and Main has been described as having 'unprecedented resonance and influence' in the field of psychology.

Michael E. Lamb is a professor and former Head of the then Department of Social and Developmental Psychology at the University of Cambridge. In 2003 Lamb was the recipient of the 2003–2004 James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science.

Triple P is a parenting intervention with the main goals of increasing the knowledge, skills, and confidence of parents and reducing the prevalence of mental health, emotional, and behavioral problems in children and adolescents. The program was originally specifically tailored for at risk children and parents, but there are now different levels of Triple P designed to work together as a broad, universal, public health approach. This program is based on principles of community psychology.

Child displacement is the complete removal or separation of children from their parents and immediate family or settings in which they have initially been reared. Displaced children includes varying categories of children who experience separation from their families and social settings due to several varied reasons. These populations include children separated from their parents, refugees, children sent to boarding schools, internally displaced persons or IDPs, and asylum seekers. Thus child displacement refers to a broad range of factors due to which children are removed from their parents and social setting. This include persecution, war, armed conflict and disruption and separation for varied reasons.

Studies have found that the father is a child's preferred attachment figure in approximately 5–20% of cases. Fathers and mothers may react differently to the same behaviour in an infant, and the infant may react to the parents' behaviour differently depending on which parent performs it.

K. Alison Clarke-Stewart was a developmental psychologist and expert on children's social development. She is well known for her work on the effects of child care on children's development, and for her research on children's suggestibility. She has written over 100 articles for scholarly journals and co-authored several leading textbooks in the field.

There are multiple consequences of different attachment patterns that are formed in childhood development. This article will explore the way attachment patterns are formed, how parents pass on their attachment styles, long-term consequences of attachment patterns, and cross cultural attachment patterns.

Jeanne Brooks-Gunn is an American developmental psychologist and professor. She is currently the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Linda Nielsen is a professor of adolescent and educational psychology in the Department of Education at Wake Forest University. She has conducted research on the effects of shared parenting and on father–daughter relationships.

Natasha J. Cabrera is a Canadian developmental psychologist known for her research on children's cognitive and social development, focusing primarily on fathers' involvement and influence on child development, ethnic and cultural variations in parenting behaviors, and factors associated with developmental risk. She holds the position of Professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methods at the University of Maryland, College of Education, where she is Director of the Family Involvement Laboratory and affiliated with the Maryland Population Research Center. Cabrera also holds the position of Secretary on the Governing Council of the Society for the Research on Child Development and has served as Associate Editor of Early Childhood Research Quarterly and Child Development. Her research has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Education Week, Time, and The Atlantic.

References

  1. 1 2 "Kari Adamsons, Associate Professor". University of Connecticut.
  2. Adamsons K; Johnson SK (2013). "An updated and expanded meta-analysis of nonresident fathering and child well-being". Journal of Family Psychology. 27 (4): 589–599. doi:10.1037/a0033786. PMID   23978321.
  3. Adamsons K (2018). "Quantity versus quality of nonresident father involvement: Deconstructing the argument that quantity doesn't matter". Journal of Child Custody. 15: 26–34. doi:10.1080/15379418.2018.1437002. S2CID   149365273.
  4. Philip Greenspun (June 29, 2017). "Summary of shared parenting research from Linda Nielsen". Philip Greenspun's Weblog.