Welcome to the Volk Parenting Lab at Brock University!

Welcome to the Volk Parenting Lab at Brock University, in the Department of Child and Youth Studies Department. The VPL lab studies parent-child relationships from infants to adolescents. On this web page you will find details about our current projects, theories, conferences, and contact information. At any time, please feel free to contact the lab.

As a psychologist, I am interested in exploring the incredibly diverse, complex, and important task that is parenting. Currently, my research falls into two main categories: child facial cues and adolescent-parent relationships. I use these two areas of research to explore parenting in different ways. My work on child facial cues allows me to take a very reductionist and experimental approach to studying parenting at a very basic level. My work on adolescent-parent relationships allows me to take the opposite approach: a very broad, ecological, correlational approach. In plain English, this means that I look at a very simple, but limited part of parenting during its early stages (infancy). I then also look at a very complex, but much broader view of parenting during its later stages (adolescence). I feel that by adopting this approach I am able to use the strengths of one program to compliment the strengths of the other.

Overall, my goal is to understand how parents parent, and whether there are ways for parents to improve the positive effectiveness of their parenting. As a parent myself, I can empathize with the difficult struggles and decisions that accompany parenthood. Indeed, one of the most difficult aspects of parenting is that "kids don't come with instruction manuals"! By understanding how parenting works, I hope to contribute to the knowledge necessary to write such a manual. Not that I'm actually considering writing such a monumental manual myself!

If you have any specific questions or comments regarding parenting problems, I am always eager to help, but I am not a clinical psychologist. Further, I don't believe that the Internet is an appropriate venue for complex diagnoses and interventions, and I would strongly suggest that you instead seek out local professionals in your own community. Some good places to start are: in Canada: Child and Family Canada and in the US: Department of Health and Human Services.

Please feel free to explore my lab research, and if you have any comments or questions, please don't hesitate to contact me!

I am currently seeking graduate and undergraduate students for work in my lab. If you are interested, please visit my lab page for further details.

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Last updated 1/1/2007

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