Research

Dr. Elena Padrón has been awarded a grant from the New York Community Trust’s Fahs-Beck Fund for Research and Experimentation. Dr. Padrón’s research entitled “Attachment and Trauma in Former Foster Youth and Their Young Children”, will evaluate the attachment patterns of 50 former foster youth and their young children ages 1-3 by using well-established and validated measures that constitute the gold standards in the field of child development.

The study has several aims. Two of its main goals are to test the mediating mechanisms for the intergenerational transmission of disorganized attachment in a high-risk foster youth sample, and to examine how foster care experiences affect mothers’ abilities to attach to their own children. It is hoped that by elucidating the mechanisms responsible for the intergenerational transmission of maladaptive attachment patterns, therapeutic interventions can be designed to better address the needs of this underserved population.