Welcome to Bathtub Tales: A blog about parenting in the time of COVID-19
Words by: Kat Peterson
Welcome to Bathtub Tales! We are so glad you are here to celebrate the launch of this blog series alongside us. You might be wondering: Why a blog series? Why share information in this way? What will be covered? Why is this important? Luckily, these are questions we’ve been musing about since Summer 2022 in order to make this series as interesting and beneficial to you as possible. This inaugural post is designed to outline why this blog was created, what you can expect from us moving forward, and how to become even more involved.
The team after a brainstorming session, Summer 2022. Left to right: interns Christian Burke, Kat Peterson, and Shaunelle Casey, and study lead Monica Ellwood-Lowe.
Why?
This series of blogs is our way of highlighting the community’s contributions to our research, sharing recent findings, and bridging the gap between academia and the community at-large. We believe that research participants ought to be included in as much of the research process as possible, and not just as channels for data collection. For this reason, these blogs have been designed with our greater research community’s interests in mind, and will focus on topics that are not only interesting to participants, but hopefully useful as well. The feasibility of these blogs is made possible through the involvement of participating families—we thank them kindly for their interest and input.
What?
Our blogs are written by a variety of authors who each play a different role in the study—from primary researchers, to transcriber interns, to families themselves. This format allows us to be more conversational, with a diversity of voices shining through. Topics vary considerably; one month you might read an overview of the study methods, and the next you might be reading stories from transcribers about their favorite memories from listening to the bath time tapes. Other posts to look out for in the coming months include a blog about what bath time means for our participating families, some analyses of individual families’ speech patterns during bath time, and a discussion of the difficulties of parenting during the COVID-19 pandemic.
When?
Blogs will be posted the third week of each month.
How to get involved?
Can’t wait for what’s next? Neither can we! We would love to hear from you if you have comments or any suggestions for the blog. If you are interested in proposing an idea for a blog post, writing a blog post of your own to be published here, or simply want to know more about anything, please do not hesitate to reach out using our contact page. We look forward to hearing from you!