Amy Nuttall
Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
Amy K. Nuttall is an expert in the areas of family relationships, parenting, and how families cope with stress.
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Dr. Nuttall’s program of research broadly focuses on understanding how children and families cope with stress in the family system and how these experiences shape development across the lifespan. She is particularly interested in the impact of parenting, including family relationships and roles (e.g., generational boundary dissolution, role reversal parentification, triangulation) and parent-child communication (e.g., emotional reminiscing), on child developmental processes of risk and resilience.
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Guided by a developmental psychopathology perspective, she studies family relationships and development in a variety of stress contexts, including both normative and severe stressors (e.g., interparental conflict, sibling with a disability, childhood bereavement, child maltreatment, parental psychopathology). She also examines the impact of these childhood experiences on relationships in adulthood, including early parenting during the transition to parenthood and the intergenerational transmission of parenting. With a particular emphasis on identifying adaptive processes and resilience, Dr. Nuttall conducts process-oriented basic research with the goal of informing preventive interventions aimed at supporting positive outcomes for children, siblings, and parents.
Dr. Nuttall has published in top journals in developmental, clinical, and quantitative psychology. Dr. Nuttall is a consulting editor for the Journal of Family Psychology, the American Psychological Association’s journal for family research.
Education
University of Notre Dame: Ph.D., Developmental Psychology
University of Notre Dame: M.A., Psychology
University of Colorado: B.A., Psychology
Selected Press
Parental expectations are healthy for kids, just don't overdo it
WLNS 6 | 2018-01-25
Research by the American Psychological Association shows high parental expectations are linked with high academic achievement, but setting expectations too high is counterproductive says Amy Nuttall, an assistant professor in Human Development and Family Studies at MSU.
"There is a delicate balance between having too many expectations and too little expectations."
When Kids Have to Act Like Parents, It Affects Them for Life
The Atlantic | 2017-10-16
“We know that siblings can buffer each other from the impacts of stressful relationships with parents,” said Amy K. Nuttall, an assistant professor in human development and family studies at Michigan State University. This may account for why some parentified siblings who come from abusive homes end up maintaining close, albeit complex, bonds into adulthood, with some “continuing to attempt to fill parental needs at the expense of their own.”
Still, Nuttall adds, others may distance themselves from their families altogether in order to escape the role.
Children as Caregivers
Inside Higher Ed | 2015-12-14
Overburdening children with caregiving responsibilities can have negative affects in adulthood. In today's Academic Minute, Michigan State University's Amy Nuttall describes her research in this area. Nuttall is an assistant professor in Michigan State's department of human development and family studies. A transcript of this podcast can be found here.
Kids With Too Many Duties Grow Up to Be Reluctant Parents
TIME Magazine | 2015-10-07
“If your childhood was defined by parents expecting you to perform too much caregiving without giving you the chance to develop your own self-identity, that might lead to confusion about appropriate expectations for children and less accurate knowledge of their developmental limitations and needs as infants,” said Amy K. Nuttall, assistant professor in MSU’s Department of Human Development and Family Studies and lead author on the study, in a release.
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Amy Nuttall