The Center for Children and Families (CCF) works to promote optimal family and child development through research, training, and outreach. With support from the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at UT Dallas, CCF is home to 18 Center-affiliated faculty who engage in research ranging from parent-child relationships to social-emotional health, language development, children’s critical thinking, and connections among the contexts of children’s lives. Also included is research focused on clinical populations, including children with developmental language disorders and those on the autism spectrum.
Translating research to practice, CCF’s community-based Play With Me program provides a 12-week experience for children at risk ages 0-3, together with their parents, to foster and support healthy brain development and strong parent-child relationships. In our Grow With Me program, we provide developmental screenings for children ages 0-5, to detect developmental delays and concerns across 5 domains and to provide referrals, support and guidance in connecting with intervention services when such needs are identified. 
New to CCF is our Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) project, Culturally Responsive Research in Developmental Science, funded by a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation. With this 3-year NSF grant, we are contributing to the diversification of developmental science through paid internships for 11 historically underrepresented students. This spring, the students will be conducting research with the understudied populations CCF serves, diving into research questions they have developed with their faculty mentors. We need your support to assist the students in carrying out these important projects that will lead to greater understanding of developmental issues in this vulnerable population of children and their families:
-$10 purchases storybooks used to observe and measure parent-child interactions, and to provide the books for the children who participate in the research project
-$25 buys toys and materials to engage children’s participation
-$50 provides an incentive for a family’s scheduled participation in a research session
-$150 purchases the newest software to evaluate language skills for children ages 3-5
-$250 buys recording and transcription equipment for qualitative interviews with families
-$500 contributes to local travel costs for our student researchers conducting home visits with families
| Rank | State | Gifts |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | TX | 26 |
| 2 | AL | 1 |
| 2 | KS | 1 |
