Dornsife center focuses on the changing family

When Darby Saxbe came across the Faculty-Led Initiatives Program at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in Spring 2019, she saw it as an opportunity to create the USC Center for the Changing Family, an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students who study the correlations between family, relationships and health — both physical and mental. Founded shortly before the coronavirus pandemic hit, the center’s work as a research hub outputs studies and findings on the modern family, especially as family life became more prominent in light of the pandemic. 

With a background in studying family stress and health as a graduate student and having worked on a study for the UCLA Center for the Everyday Lives of Families, Saxbe, an associate professor of psychology, said she understood the impact family relationships have on well-being. And then later as a postdoctorate and early faculty member with children, Saxbe said she began to develop a deeper understanding of the pressures and challenges of the modern family. 

“I started to feel like I was experiencing all the things that I had studied in terms of being overwhelmed, having too many things to manage, struggling to kind of find time to spend with kids while also working full time; just developing an appreciation of how challenging … the demands of a modern family are,” Saxbe said. “There’s a ton of pressure on the individual parents … and that’s not necessarily the most natural or humane way to operate as a family.”

Out of more than 30 working groups that submitted white paper proposals to the Faculty-Led Initiatives Program — whom Saxbe said were essentially asked to assemble their groups around certain themes — Saxbe said the Center for the Changing Family was one of only two groups selected to receive a start-up grant. After a year into their grant funding, more than 60 faculty and graduate students across various USC disciplines participate at the center.

Saxbe said that, as a psychologist, she knew she wanted to create a group with interdisciplinary faculty who utilized different approaches to study stress and health within families. In accordance with Saxbe’s goal, the center comprises individuals across various disciplines, including sociologists, a neonatologist, an economist and various doctors.

“I think by bringing those different perspectives together — people that are working with different populations and are interested in different things — we have a lot that we can learn from each other,” Saxbe said.

Similar to her work at the lab for NeuroEndocrinology of Social Ties, also known as the NEST lab, Saxbe’s research at the center focuses on couples adapting and transitioning when expecting their first child, following them through their pregnancy to the first year of their postpartum period. 

“Family configurations look really different across different cultures in different countries,” Saxbe said. “We have this kind of ‘Leave It to Beaver’ United States ideal of the two parent traditional family, but that’s really not the typical family configuration across the world … I think it’s important to understand because we know that close relationships are really important for health and well-being … Thinking about how we can support connections and close relationships that are supportive of each other is an important policy goal.”

Dorian Traube, associate professor of social work and a member of the center, has worked with the center since its inception. 

“There are a lot of really amazing faculty and students doing work — both research and clinical work related to Family Development in our University — but we didn’t really have any kind of central place for all of us to collaborate,” Traube said. “So then we were missing opportunities to leverage people’s expertise. I thought it was just a fantastic idea.”

After spending the past five years as the director of the Parents as Teachers at USC Telehealth at the School of Social Work, Traube now focuses her research on the ways in which virtual home visitation supports families and issues related to child maltreatment during the coronavirus pandemic. With the Parents as Teachers program launching nationwide due to high demand from pandemic social distancing, Traube said she will continue to look into quickly upscaling the program to meet the growing needs of parents. 

With the onset of the pandemic and President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda involving parental leave and universal preschool access, Traube said she believes that this is an important time to have an intense focus on what families need to be successful.

“I think this is a critical time, especially in the United States, where we … have a President who is centering issues around family,” Traube said. “Very little has happened in the last 50 years to better support families. We are at a point where the government is starting to look at that, and I think our center can offer really important information in that decision-making process.”

With Traube as one of her mentors, Abigail Palmer Molina, a graduate student studying social work, received a grant from the center to conduct research on supporting parents of young children, focusing on how to address maternal depression and improving access to treatment and services for underserved families and communities. Palmer Molina said the research grant she received was pivotal for her research, which allowed her to build on her dissertation and develop skills such as managing her own research budget, hiring employees, developing a research design and disseminating her findings. 

“The center’s funding … was a pretty fast turnaround and really gave me the flexibility to think about doing research differently for the moment,” Palmer Molina said. “It definitely helped change my research and make it more tied to what’s going on immediately around me and how I can best serve families.”

Palmer Molina also said that being a part of the center and their programming has helped her stay up-to-date with some of the issues and policies on Biden’s agenda, while also working at the forefront of policy change that creates an impact outside the center.

“My goals are to complete the work … and definitely take advantage of whatever programming they provide,” Palmer Molina said. “I think one of the one of the gaps that I noticed early as a student at USC is the lack of a … central focus on families, even though we have so many high-impact family scholars.”

In the last year, the Center for the Changing Family has hosted various events, including a collaboration with the Center for Political Future about politics and policies surrounding caregiving issues. Other events have included diverse speakers, such as a policy spokesperson from a Washington D.C. think tank, an advocacy spokesperson from Paid Leave for the United States, author Elliot Haspel and Congressman Jimmy Gomez, to talk about care issues. While Saxbe said she was cognizant that some students and faculty had found it difficult to find time for another hour-long zoom meeting out of their day, the people that did attend these events were enthusiastic about going and creating a community across different departments at USC.

“I think that it would have been much harder to organize if we had depended on everybody being willing to show up in person,” Saxbe said. “In some ways, we’ve been able to be more ambitious because we’ve been remote.” 

Optimistic that the center will continue in-person this fall, Saxbe said she looks forward to finally sitting down with people who she had many Zoom interactions with and to continue connecting with researchers. She also said that she anticipates occasional Zoom events to collaborate with experts outside of the Los Angeles area.

“I hope that we can raise awareness about research on families and the importance of relationships for health and well-being,” Saxbe said. “I hope that we can … help contribute to forging some really significant collaborations and that we can help to position USC as a leader in some of the most cutting edge research on families that is being produced.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated Abigail Palmer Molina’s name as Abigail Molina. The Daily Trojan regrets this error.