People of the Fathers, Parenting, & Families Initiative
The Fathers, Parenting, & Families Endowment helps support two faculty lines:
Bruce J. Ellis, Ph.D.
Professor and John & Doris Norton Endowed Chair in Fathers, Parenting, and Families
Dr. Ellis’ research focuses on generating and testing evolutionary models of developmental experience. At one level, this focus involves theory development: advancing new models of how evolution has shaped the child’s brain to respond to specific features of family environments and the larger ecological context. Central to this theoretical work has been the development of paternal investment theory (Ellis, 2004), which articulates a special role for fathers in regulation of daughters’ sexual development. At another level, this work involves theory testing: examining the impact of fathers and families on children’s biological stress responses, timing of pubertal development, and first sexual experience and pregnancy.
Melissa A. Barnett, Ph. D.
John & Doris Norton Assistant Professor in Fathers, Parenting, and Families
Dr. Barnett's research considers how particular family relationships, including father-child relationships, interact with each other and with the larger cultural and socioeconomic environment to influence parental well-being, parenting, and co-parenting behaviors, and early child social and emotional development. This work focuses on the ways in which non-maternal caregivers, especailly fathers and grandmothers, influence development early in life within particular sociocultural and familial contexts. Dr. Barnett examines the factors that shape specific fathering behaviors and patterns of involvement, and how inturn those behaviors and patterns are linked to child well-being.