As any good clinical psychologist knows, the seeds of who a person will become are planted early on in life.
Dr. Francesca Penner, an assistant professor in Baylor’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, is well known for her work with parents and children — mostly researching the connection between parental mental health and children’s socio-emotional development. But as big of a name as she’s made for herself in academia, she’s relatively new to the University.
Early Life
Dr. Penner grew up in Northern California, her family moving to Middle Tennessee during her high school years. Of course, then she was just known as Francesca, and she was very much a younger version of who she is today. Already as a youth she was deeply focused on academics, dabbled in sports — “though I would not call myself athletic,” she laughs — and had already taken on the role of “therapist” among her friends.
She first wanted to follow in the footsteps of both her parents and become a teacher and even majored in English at the University of Chicago. But life had other plans for Penner. In 2009, just after she graduated, the workforce was in a huge slump and the country in a recession. In a backup plan that ended up lasting four years, Penner landed a job teaching not English, but math curriculum online.
“I actually learned from that job that I didn’t really want to be a teacher,” she said. “It just wasn’t the right path for me.”
“I knew I wanted to work with kids, though,” she added. “So that sort of pushed me in the direction of child psychology.”
Long story short, Penner ended up at Vanderbilt to get her master’s degree in child studies with a focus on child development and child psychology. She then went to the University of Houston for her Ph.D. in clinical psychology, then Yale’s Child Study Center for a postdoctoral fellowship before landing at Baylor.
Of course, as those in Penner’s field of psychology know there is no “long story short;” not really. There is always an underlying why.
It’s Personal
When Penner was growing up in the ’90s and early-2000s, the world was different. We didn’t have shows talking about mental health, we didn’t have TikTok “experts” giving us tips on anxiety, and there certainly weren’t many adults modeling vulnerability.
Fortunately for Penner, she said her parents were “very open about mental health,” and were a huge support for Penner in college when she felt emotionally under water and overwhelmed with her studies.
But in high school, Penner noticed a trend among her friend group and she seamlessly — almost instinctively — stepped into a part that she still plays today.
“A lot of the friends I had in high school in particular struggled with mental health,” she said. “And I sort of played the role of counselor to them sometimes.”
Several years later when Penner was getting her master’s degree it was in her clinical psychology research lab that her decision to work in clinical psychology, particularly with children and their parents, was truly solidified.
“I think clinical psych is exciting because of the possibilities for early intervention. If we intervene in childhood and adolescence, we can make things better for someone’s whole life,” Penner said enthusiastically, adding, “And I just really enjoy working with kids and teenagers.”
The PAIR Lab
Though Penner realized after college that teaching high school English wasn’t her dream job, she did ultimately end up teaching a little. These days Penner teaches one class per semester — specifically Psychopathology, a class for undergraduate neuroscience majors — but much of her time is spent in the lab.
When many of us imagine a laboratory setting, we picture some combination of a doctor’s office and Hollywood’s rendition of a mad scientist’s laboratory. And while some labs certainly are filled with microscopes, vials, and white, sterile surfaces, Dr. Penner’s Parenting and Intergenerational Resilience (PAIR) Lab looks quite different.
“Psychology labs, I think, are a funny term,” she said. “It looks more like a clinic than a ‘lab,’ I’d say.”
Penner’s lab is located in downtown Waco, so it’s more accessible to the public, and sounds a lot like a comfortable office space where you wouldn’t mind spending the day. The space is made up of assessment rooms with desks and chairs where Penner can interview people or have them fill out surveys comfortably. A big work room filled with students’ computers is usually bustling with three graduate students and six or seven undergrads.
And there’s a little open space dedicated to a future addition of EEG machines, almost like a parent clearing out a room for a future nursery and baby.
The EEG machines will eventually provide the team with a better understanding of what’s happening with parents and children on a cerebral level. But EEGs are expensive, and it will take a grant to add them to the lab.
“That’s another big part of what I do as a junior researcher,” Penner said. “I write grants.”
A Day in the Life
Penner starts out her day, like many people do, at home with her family. She has two daughters. Once breakfasts are done and things are in order, Penner heads off to campus to teach her class before spending the rest of her day in the lab downtown.
On a normal day during the school year, she’ll meet with her graduate and undergraduate students, advising them on anything from the data they’re analyzing to what courses to take. And then she’ll spend time working on her own manuscripts — and of course, the grants.
Currently, though, Penner is prepping for her first in-person study at Baylor, so days look like training her students, canvassing Waco with flyers to recruit participants, and a lot of “figuring it out” as they go along.
The Research
Penner, ever the academic, is juggling multiple research projects across two universities, all beneath the general umbrella of children and parental mental health. Her work with Yale, which is just wrapping up, is funded by a grant, and her current research at Baylor is funded by the University.
Maternal Opioid Use Disorder and Early Caregiving
This smaller study is a part of a much larger one at Yale and should wrap up sometime this year or next as Penner continues to work on this research from afar.
“This is looking at mothers who are in treatment specifically for opioid use disorder. So, medication-assisted treatment,” she said. “And we’re looking at their caregiving behavior early on — postpartum and the first year of life — and comparing that to a control group.”
Ultimately, she hopes to learn more about how parental addiction can impact children’s early development with this research.
Posts to Parenting
Though this study isn’t about opioids, it certainly has to do with another addiction: social media.
Penner describes a new age of mothers, many of whom rely heavily on social media for parenting advice.
“Social media is pretty unregulated, right?” she said. “So, there could be things that are from a pediatrician that are super evidence-based. And then there are just parents [on social media] who could be saying anything and it’s not evidence-based at all.”
This study will investigate how much new moms are relying on social media to parent, and how that’s impacting their young kids. As this will be her first in-person study in Waco, this will involve recruiting local moms and having them come into the lab to answer questions and interact with their babies.
Social Media Usage Across the Country
Related to the previous study, Penner and her team are zooming out beyond Waco and looking at how social media is being used by parents nationally. This one will rely heavily on surveys and online communication — so there won’t be an in-person aspect to it – but the hope is to learn how social media is impacting parents across the U.S.
Social Media Hashtags
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Penner has a third smaller study going on right now about social media. After all, it is the water we swim in these days. Penner and her team are looking to understand how that’s impacting us — and particularly our children. In this study, her small team at Baylor is combing through social media hashtags related to parenting and coding them.
Baylor Students Mental Health Check In
“We just finished data collection for this small study,” she said, describing a very simple that just went out to Baylor students. In the survey, Penner and her team asked students to answer some retrospective questions about their own childhoods and their current mental health.
What Does This All Mean for Parents and Kids?
What does this all mean? What does this research show us about parents and their kids? And moreover, what can we do about it?
Penner’s message is both straightforward and reassuring: “Parenting behavior is really important, and it has an effect from early on. In infancy, for example, is when the attachment relationship is being developed and where so much brain development is happening. Parents have a huge opportunity during this time.
“But I’ll also say,” she added, “that it’s not the end. Parents don’t have to be 100 percent perfect all the time, because that’s impossible. And that’s the other thing the research shows us.”
We asked her how her research has impacted her own parenting.
“Mostly my research has influenced me to think of my [girls] as independent little people and recognize they’re different from me. They’re different from each other. And that helps in understanding why they behave the way they do.”
She laughed, noting that even with all the data, of course, she doesn’t get it right 100 percent right all the time either.
Photos courtesy of Dr. Francesca Penner
