• Question: why did you choose childhood psychologies instead of any others? What influenced you?

    Asked by anon-236966 to Tom, Rachel, Priya, Jessica, Dan, Beatrice on 10 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Priya Silverstein

      Priya Silverstein answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      I was interested in developmental psychology because I’m interested in what makes humans humans! I wanted to know whether we’re born with the innate ability to do a lot of things (like understand each other and communicate with each other) or whether we learn these things through experience.

    • Photo: Dan O'Hare

      Dan O'Hare answered on 11 Mar 2020:

      I think I’m passionate about children’s voice. Children have a fantastic desire to learn, and their ideas can really help us understand them and how to support them to be the best that they can be. I wanted to work in a way that help children have a voice, so they could shape the systems around them e.g. school, neighbourhoods and communities.

      In all my work with children, I have never met one who couldn’t help adults understand how to help them better.

    • Photo: Jessica Pope

      Jessica Pope answered on 11 Mar 2020:

      I had 2 friends growing up who got cancer in their teenage years. So for me, I wanted to look at how teenagers cope, because I was astounded at how the managed but also as kind of a tribute to them (unfortunately they both died at around the age of 16). Initially I started looking at children and teenagers, but then saw that cancers in older teenagers (over 16) and young people (up to 25) was minimally researched, so thought I would examine their experiences

    • Photo: Beatrice Hayes

      Beatrice Hayes answered on 12 Mar 2020:

      Being a primary school teacher before I was a scientist. That really inspired me to research children 🙂

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