Michal Perlman

Biography

Michal Perlman is Professor at the Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Her overarching interest is in environmental influences on the social development of preschool-aged children. She has two main lines of ongoing research that address this interest. The first has to do with the quality of child care children receive and its impact on their development. In the last few years, she has been focusing on identifying critical aspects of child care quality and developing empirically based ways of measuring those aspects. This involves extensive assessments of child care providers (both centre-based, and family home care providers) and the children and families they serve. Her current studies in this area involve data collection both in Canada and the U.S using both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods. Her second line of research has to do with children’s development of conflict resolution skills. She has been looking at a series of questions related to the role of parents in managing conflicts between their young children, bidirectional influences in conflict management, the development of conflict scripts, etc. She will be expanding studies in this question to look at the impact of children’s conflict management as they enter school. Professor Perlman received her Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo.

Courses Taught:
PPG2016H:
Public Policy for Children