Michal Perlman
Social interaction and early childhood policy research lab
About
I have a PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Waterloo. I am a Professor at the department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. I am also cross appointed at the School of Public Policy and Governance at U of T.
Research
I have two main lines of ongoing research about young children's development.
The first has to do with the quality of child care children receive and its impact on their development. In the last few years I have been focusing on identifying critical aspects of child care quality, and developing empirically based ways of measuring those aspects. This involves extensive assessments of child care providers (both centre based, and family home care providers) and the children and families they serve.
My second line of research has to do with children’s development of perspective taking and conflict resolution skills. Here I have been looking at a series of questions related to the role of parents in managing conflicts between their young children, bidirectional influences in conflict management and the development of conflict scripts.
Recently, I have been studying how the warmth, responsivity and perspective taking abilities of family members and educators help support children's development. I have worked with different levels of government in Canada and in the US. In addition, my work has been funded by SSHRC, CIHR, the McCain Foundation, different levels of government, the Canadian Council for Learning and other agencies.