About the programme:
Multiple research studies have shown that a mother’s reminiscing of past events can have a significant effect on the child’s social and emotional wellbeing, especially where this relates to the child’s developing sense of self and identity. However, these studies have also demonstrated that there are qualitative differences (including cultural differences) that can influence outcomes. For instance, what is remembered (positive or negative, facts or emotions) and how it is remembered (elaborated or repeated, for didactic or other purposes) can affect the child’s emerging capacity to regulate his or her emotions and make meaning out of challenging circumstances. In this webinar, Dr Denise Lai Chua will share snippets from empirical studies on how mutual acts of remembering, retelling, and sense-making can help nurture a happier and healthier child. At the same time, she will recount how writing the autoethnography, Preschool in the Wilderness was her attempt at connecting fragments of her personal past into a coherent narrative for her own wholeness, and by extension, her children’s.
Speaker: Dr Denise Lai Chua, Author of Preschool in the Wilderness: Traversing Joy, Grief, and Hope in Singapore’s Early Childhood Landscape
