In April 2021, psychologist Adam Hoffman co-led a virtual roundtable discussion for child development scholars on studying Native American communities. Hoffman, an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell Human Ecology, had written his dissertation about Cherokee youth, and he and other presenters shared the importance of engaging Indigenous groups in the research process.
Afterward, Hoffman wondered how many developmental science papers had actually been written about Indigenous children and youth. After poring through archives of six journals for the past two decades, he found only 66 out of nearly 13,000 articles — just 0.5% of the academic literature. That was despite the fact that there are more than 5,000 distinct Indigenous communities spread across every continent. “I noticed that there’s a really big lack of representation, and I thought, ‘This is problematic,’” Hoffman said.
He approached the editor of Child Development, the field’s leading journal, and proposed creating a special section aimed at highlighting the psychological and developmental experiences of Indigenous children. The editor agreed, and Hoffman assembled a team of collaborators that included Indigenous scholars to solicit papers reflecting a diversity of experiences.
The resulting special section, published in November 2024, featured four papers highlighting Indigenous children and youth across the United States, Canada, and Guatemala. Co-editors are Monica Tsethlikai from the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University, Ashley Cole from Oklahoma State University’s Department of Psychology, Megan Bang from the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, and Florrie Fei-Yin Ng from the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Department of Educational Psychology.
“We need to have a more comprehensive and robust understanding of the psychological experiences of all children and youth, and that includes those who are typically marginalized,” Hoffman said. “We need to elevate those because their marginalization has resulted in the disparities we see today.”
As a graduate student, Hoffman focused his dissertation on teens in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians based in North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains. After being introduced to the community by a personal connection, Hoffman studied whether bolstering the identity of middle-schoolers through role models who shared their gender, ethnicity or both could boost motivation in science, technology, engineering, and math. The study's results were mixed, but the experience left a lasting impression. “Native Americans are the minority of the minorities, as the smallest major ethnic or racial group in the U.S.,” Hoffman said. “Trying to find ways to bring these voices out through my position and privilege was something I felt would be helpful.”
Hoffman went on to study other marginalized youth, with a focus on gender and sexual orientation. His research explores how social identities change over time in adolescents and how interventions in this sphere might promote mental health and well-being. In one experiment, he asked high schoolers to write an essay highlighting what they liked about an identity of theirs, such as gender or race, three times throughout ninth grade. He found that teens who participated remained stable in their self-esteem at a time when it normally dips.
When creating the special section in Child Development, Hoffman and the team wanted to provide greater visibility into the unique experiences of Indigenous children. They called for papers from around the world and from a variety of contexts, including cities, rural areas, and reservations. They noted that existing papers tended to focus on pathologies, such as academic gaps and mental health struggles, so they sought to highlight the population’s strengths and assets.
After receiving more than 50 proposals, they chose to include four papers. One explored Indigenous conceptions of caregiving, which extended to the broader community and connections to the land and animals, as an alternative to traditional attachment theory. The second revealed that Native American youth with caregivers who were highly connected to their culture had fewer symptoms of anger and post-traumatic stress disorder. Another article examined collaboration in more than 20 Guatemalan Mayan families across three decades. The final study examined social determinants of health in nearly 3,000 First Nations children in Canada, finding that learning Indigenous culture and high community cohesion, among other factors, were linked to greater well-being.
Hoffman points out that studies such as these are necessary to accurately understand Indigenous child development. “We’ve realized from Indigenous perspectives that there are lots of ways of knowing,” he said. “When you impose a Western paradigm developed through empiricism, you may not accurately capture the process you’re trying to understand or the outcomes you’re trying to assess because they’re not necessarily relevant for the culture.”
Building that comprehension can lead to more effective interventions, Hoffman says. For example, “perhaps for other groups focusing on individual experience would be best, but for Native youth, it might be better to be inclusive of other people in their lives,” he said. “That’s something important we’ve gleaned from this.”
The special section was a start, but Hoffman says a lot more effort is needed to improve scholarship in this area. Research with Indigenous communities can be challenging to undertake, since the population is small, many groups live in remote areas, and some are suspicious of academics based on past traumatic experiences.
To overcome these barriers, Hoffman recommends that the field focus on mentoring and training Indigenous scholars and that journals seriously consider submissions from those conducting this research. For non-Indigenous scholars interested in contributing, he advises adopting a model of community-based participatory research. “You can’t just go in and do this alone,” he said. “You really need to be working with the community to ask, ‘What are your issues? What are your problems? And is there any way I could potentially help?’”