It Takes a Village
CSUDH Professor Wins NSF CAREER Award to Study How Family Support Impacts Infant Development
For the first time ever at CSUDH, a professor has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. The award is among the NSF’s most prestigious honors for early-career faculty, recognizing researchers who show exceptional promise as both scientists and educators. Professor of Psychology Irene Tung has been awarded $749,981 to conduct a five-year study examining how grandparents’ involvement supports families during the transition to parenthood and impacts infant development — a topic that has rarely been closely studied before.
“We’re hoping to better understand these dynamics,” says Tung. “What does familial involvement look like in pregnancy and during this transition? And do we see these factors having an effect on the child’s outcome or the mother-child relationship throughout the first year of becoming a parent?”
The project has its seeds in Tung’s first research project at CSUDH, a study of stress factors and mental health in pregnant women. During the study, one of the recurring themes that participants spoke about was how their families helped them during and after their pregnancies.
“Specifically, many participants would talk about their own mom or their in-laws,” says Tung. “Often, it felt like this intergenerational support was one of the most important things that helped a parent transition smoothly.”
“Of course, we also had some parents saying their in-laws were their biggest sources of stress during the transition to parenthood,” she notes. “So I went to the literature to see what we know about how new parents can best navigate these relationships.
What Tung found was a gap in research and knowledge around multi-generational family relationships during pregnancy. The NSF was impressed with her grant proposal, and she began work. “Fortunately, the NSF ended up liking the idea!” she says.
The first segment of the study involved Tung and her student assistants conducting focus groups with pregnant and postpartum women, as well as interviewing new grandparents.
“We asked them about what family involvement looks like — all the dynamics, how do you communicate, what are the issues, what are the things that have been surprising?” says Tung. Her team used the data to zero in on a few target topics they want to better understand.
The bulk of the project will be a longitudinal study following a cohort of 125 pregnant women through the process of pregnancy, birth, and early childhood. They’ll be interviewed about family dynamics and involvement. “We’ll be trying to understand specific patterns of communication, what conflict might look like, but also what specific kinds of support look like,” says Tung.
She says the project will examine support given to new parents from their own parents, as well as extended family members and “chosen kin” — networks of support that aren’t often researched or talked about, but are extremely common.
Now I get to train students in rigorous biological and psychological methods, and then take what we learn directly back to families in the community. That’s what this work is really about.”
One of the most unique aspects of the project is its biological component. In addition to examining psychological outcomes like postpartum depression and anxiety, the study will also examine how grandparental support influences the body’s stress physiology during pregnancy, including heart rate variability and immune markers like inflammatory cytokines.
“One of our central hypotheses is that having a strong network of family support will help mothers regulate stress in the body during pregnancy, which has downstream effects on fetal development and infant outcomes,” says Tung. Her team will measure these effects by tracking psychological, physiological, and inflammatory indicators across pregnancy, then following their infants through with those mothers’ first year of life, including check-ins at three, six, and twelve months.
Beyond the research itself, the project will also create significant opportunities for student research training at CSUDH. Over the five-year grant period, between 30 and 40 students are expected to participate in this research, gaining hands-on experience in psychological and biological research methods.
Tung is also working with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) on campus to develop community-facing workshops based on her findings. “OLLI serves adults aged 50 and older in the local community, many of whom are grandparents themselves. We’ve been partnering with them to develop hands-on workshops for grandparents and extended family members.”
For Tung, the grant represents a rare opportunity to close the loop between science and community. “The original idea for this project came from the women in our study, who kept telling us how much their families mattered during pregnancy,” she says. “Now I get to train students in rigorous biological and psychological methods, and then take what we learn directly back to families in the community. That’s what this work is really about, and having federal support to do it at this scale is huge and deeply meaningful.”
