Making Sure Everything Is A-OK

Geraldine Oades-Sese and Deborah Carr

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Geraldine Oades-Sese, left, is the associate director and assistant professor of pediatrics at the Institute for the Study of Child Development, which is part of the Department of Pediatrics at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Deborah Carr is the chair of the Department of Sociology at the School of Arts and Sciences who also has an appointment at the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research.

Photography: 
Nick Romanenko

Elmo has a new mission; Cookie Monster and Abby Cadabby do, too. Geraldine Oades-Sese—associate director and assistant professor of pediatrics at the Institute for the Study of Child Development, which is part of the Department of Pediatrics at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School—is testing to see if the Sesame Street characters can teach kids to better manage the stress of their parents’ separation, divorce, and incarceration. She wants to help kids build resilience—the ability to cope with life’s challenges successfully—and change the trajectory of their lives.

The psychologist’s 50-50 blend of research and patient care has fueled her career. “What skills can we foster in 3- to 5-year-olds to make them more resilient?” her research asks. On the patient-care side, she works with adolescents 16 and older who may not have gained certain basic resiliency skills during childhood—gang leaders, drug abusers, teens in any kind of trouble. “Many of these kids have been abused. Of all the girls I’ve worked with, not one has not been sexually abused,” she says. “They come from dysfunctional families.” Gangs and drugs are their way of coping, however ineffectively. She is trying to teach the same skills to the teens that she teaches to the preschoolers, but the obstacles are enormous.

Oades-Sese NCAS’98 supervises the work of more than 30 Rutgers students, as well as a team of 25 research assistants in San Diego, working on three related studies for the Sesame Street Resilience Project. They are testing the effectiveness of Sesame Street materials developed to teach young children more effective strategies for coping with daily challenges and stressors at home and school. The research is funded by a $718,761, two-year grant from the Sesame Street Workshop. In San Diego alone, there are 1,800 military and civilian kids, parents, and teachers in more than 67 schools participating in the study.

Data analyses will finish this fall. But based on early, positive reports, Oades-Sese wants to expand Sesame Street’s “Little Children, Big Challenges” toolkit for children of military parents, including reservists. It’s an overlooked problem, she says.

Persistence, determination, and helping kids build communication skills to express how they are feeling go a long way toward problem solving, says Oades-Sese, who is looking for additional funding to expand her work with young children. “I feel like an explorer whose mission is to figure out the resilience factor,” she says. Like Ernie, Bert, and the rest of the Sesame Street crew, Oades-Sese wants to bring greater joy into children’s homes and schools—and make their lives better.

The Best of Times

Stress can be paralyzing, sickening—even deadly—and it’s endemic in our society. Rutgers professor Deborah Carr, whose own outlook is buoyantly optimistic, studies the impact of life’s major stressors. Carr—the chair of and a professor in the Department of Sociology at the School of Arts and Sciences who also has an appointment at the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research—discovered her life’s work in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. As part of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which followed 10,317 men and women from their high school graduation in 1957 through their middle and later years, she looked at who had reached, or not reached, early career goals by mid-life and its effect on their mental well-being.

Since arriving at Rutgers in 2002, Carr has primarily addressed end-of-life issues and the effects of widowhood and divorce on physical and mental health. She also studies body weight’s psychological and social consequences, particularly the effect of obesity on experiences of discrimination as well as on sexual and interpersonal relationships.

Among Carr’s publications are a book and a few dozen articles on widowhood, covering topics from reactions and coping strategies to dating, future relationships, and family dynamics. In her newest title, Worried Sick (Rutgers University Press, 2014), she looks at stress—from its definition, including its physical and mental effects, to why some people roll with the punches and others cannot. The final chapter is a tip-sheet for beating, or at least taming, stress.

Our basic personalities and coping styles generally govern our reactions to stress, she says. An optimist will say: “How can I fix this?” Pessimists often react by catastrophizing, mentally playing out the unrealistic, dire end to a situation, or ruminating, playing the situation over and over again in their heads, thereby reliving the negative emotion.

Carr has a few tips for coping. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. People need to rely on one another; reciprocity is fundamental to survival. In times of stress, she says, try not to rely on caffeine, nicotine, or alcohol, which adversely affect your health. And keep in mind that the older people get, the better they cope because they have had more experiences of competence. If you live long enough, Carr says, it can be the best of times.