As we launch into 2026—despite painfully freezing temperatures in NYC and a calendar with overly optimistic back-to-back-to-back meetings—I can’t help but feel an immense sense of warm gratitude for the opportunity to mentor outstanding undergraduates, graduate students, research staff, and postdoctoral scientists on our ever-favorite topic of infant development. I am likewise grateful for the opportunity to continue to learn from and contribute to members in the International Congress of Infant Studies. As I enter my 35th year as Professor at NYU, preceded by 4 years of PhD mentorship under Marc Bornstein (yup, I am very old!), I attended ~20 ICIS conferences, more than any other conference. That’s because ICIS is my favorite society by far. I admire the exquisite balance it offers between cutting-edge scholarship and simply having a good time with a vibrant, energetic, visionary, and absolutely welcoming international community of researchers at all stages of their careers. I can’t wait to add another meeting to my list this July in Panama.
Looking back to the end of 2025, November and December were all ICIS. The two weeks before ‘submission deadline’ our lab was frenzied to say the least (I would venture a guess that this was the case for many of you). It was filled with meetings and collaborations on abstracts around infant object interactions, communication, language, social interactions, temporal features of behavior, the home environment, culture, and even motor development (thanks to my sister lab, led by Karen Adolph). Somehow, we managed to submit who knows how many posters, talks, and symposia (I lost count).
So, what is the point of my writing this blog? Why do I feel compelled to express the deep fulfillment I feel about the work we do, the sharing of our research with others, and learning about the pioneering work of our colleagues (many of whom are also good friends)? Why do I feel compelled to applaud the open sharing that allows everyone in our field to learn and grow from each other in ways that make the whole much more than the sum of its parts? Why do I feel compelled to celebrate the sometimes-half-full glass of infancy research even at times when the half-empty glass appears to be front and center? Because I cannot think of anything more important than seeking to understand how infants learn and develop and the factors that propel their learning. The questions we ask as a field, and our excitement around scientific discovery and the testing of hypotheses, must always be louder than any obstacles or concerns. In truth, our glass is overflowing—with new ideas, new methods of data collection, new technologies, and new analytic approaches that allow us to collectively push science forward.
Of course, I am quite aware of the reality that many mentees and staff in my lab, department, university (and surely universities around the globe) are concerned about the future—the job market, academia, grant funding. Students are further concerned about countless other pressures and hurdles they must overcome—their comprehensive exams, R scripts that won’t run, how much they need to publish to land a postdoc or faculty position, and how to handle the comments of ‘Reviewer 2’ (if you are Reviewer #2, I prefer you don’t let us know).
But then I remind everyone in the lab to take a pause and reflect on how totally cool and exciting their work is. I tell my students and staff that their only job right now, their only concern, should be to grow and be passionate about their research and ultimately to do good (hopefully great) work that advances the science of infancy. Then, when we get together for our weekly lab meeting, the excitement of their work takes on a new life. We get to watch videos—hundreds of hours of videos—of babies and toddlers yelling “NO!” to their moms or dads, crawling and walking from room to room, flitting from object to object as they explore their surroundings and generate feedback from the people around them. We watch videos of cultural practices around the globe, from cradling to cuddling, talking to walking. We observe and quantify the unique physical characteristics of apartments in NYC, Hong Kong, and Seoul South Korea, which contain hundreds of child-designed toys, and we contrast those environments with homes in Tajikistan, which are spread over courtyards and where infants play with boulders and twigs, their cribs, plastic water bottles, and the pots and pans their mothers use to cook. We talk about the next study we will run, the grant that just got funded (yay!), the next grant we are currently writing, and how to design our protocols. We start the process of translating and adapting methods and measures to different languages, thankfully made possible by the multilingual community of committed and eager researchers who populate our lab. We upload our videos, coding manuals, spreadsheets and so on to Databrary.org so that authorized investigators can address new questions that we don’t have the bandwidth or expertise to tackle, thereby capitalizing on the investments of federal agencies, foundations, and families who generously give their time to us. Then, we stop to write our abstracts, about what we saw and what we learned, and we submit our work to ICIS.
We may have been frenzied toward the end of 2025, but what could be more fulfilling than clicking submit to share our science? And now, in the blustery cold of winter, we will sit back to await the news, celebrate the overflowing cup of infancy research, and plan our trip to Panama to attend the greatest international conference in developmental science out there. See you all soon!
About the Author
Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda
New York University
Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda is Professor of Developmental Psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, Faculty Affiliate of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Director of the Play and Language Lab (https://wp.nyu.edu/catherinetamislemonda/). She examines infants’ learning and development in social-cultural context with emphasis on the embodied and embedded nature of infant learning in the everyday home environment. Tamis-LeMonda’s research involves families from different language and cultural backgrounds in the United States and internationally. Her observations reveal that infants’ moment-to-moment vocal productions and speech, gestures, object interactions, and locomotion elicit contingent responses from caregivers that cascade to child learning across developmental domains and time. Tamis-LeMonda’s work has been funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Development, National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, Administration for Children and Families, the LEGO Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the Robinhood Foundation. She has 250+ publications, is author of the textbook Child Development: Context, Culture, and Cascades (Oxford University Press, 2022; UK adaptation 2025), and co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Infant Development (2020), Child Psychology: A Handbook of Contemporary Issues (editions 1, 2, and 3), Handbook of Father Involvement: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (editions 1 and 2), and The Development of Social Cognition and Communication. She has held positions on national and international boards, committees, societies, journals, and grant review and advisory boards, including serving on the Governing Council for the Society for Research on Child Development (SRCD), being President of the International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS), serving as Associate Editor of Infancy and Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and being a Fellow of the American Psychological Society.
