Nari Kang: Beyond the bathtub, or bridging personal early memories to research on parenting practices and emotion coaching

Photo of researcher Nari Kang as an adult in 2023. — Human development graduate student Nari Kang. Photo courtesy of Nari Kang.

This piece was written in the fall of 2023 by GRAD 5144 (Communicating Science) student Nari Kang as part of an assignment to write a story about her research.

I clearly remember the day, when I was about 7 or 8 months old, that my mom gave me a warm bath in the tiny red bathtub. She played with my hair, making a horn like a goblin, and laughed at me. I was delighted and felt the warmth from my mom.

This is my first memory, and I will carry it with me forever. Growing up, I thought everyone could recall a memory from infancy, but I discovered that not everyone does. Even my sister, who has the same parents as me — in fact, she was next to me when I was given the bath — does not have her earliest memory of infancy. Her first memory is from her preschool years. I started asking people I knew about their first-ever memory in life; I’ve met only one person who has a memory from infancy.

What a surprise! Once I learned that not everyone remembers their infancy, I have always wondered what makes the differences between people.

Picture of Nari Kang as an infant — Nari Kang, at the time of her memory of being bathed in the red bathtub. Photo courtesy of Nari Kang.

Then, belatedly, the longest puberty hit really hard, not just me but my family. My family and I had a very rough time from my late adolescence to young adulthood. Drinking, staying out overnight, misunderstandings, miscommunicating, you can name what I might have brought to my family. At that time, I felt like no one in this world could understand me, even though I did not know what it was that I wanted to be understood. Everything seemed so annoying and complicated. I pushed my family away and felt like they left me out, too. I felt all alone and I thought family did not matter.

One day, I reconnected to one of my long-lost aunts. She seemed to “get” me, and I felt heard when meeting with her, so I began spending a lot of time talking to her about what I was going through. I started to see the paradoxes in my feelings and the hypocrisy in my treatment of my family. I learned how to communicate with others, especially with my family, without just letting out irrational, selfish feelings. I finally understood that I needed first to know who I was as a person before I could ask to be understood by others. This was the moment I finally set myself free from my own trap of crooked feelings.

Picture of Nari Kang as a toddler — Nari Kang as a toddler. Photo courtesy of Nari Kang.

My first-ever memory, of that warm time with my mother, was also there to assure me that I would always do my best to live this life fully.

This experience led me to study what I study — parental emotion coaching — because I would like children to be happy at the end of their days. Parents are one of the most critical factors early in children’s lives; even the smallest memory that I have, being in the tiny red bathtub, still helps me to get through thick and thin. Therefore, I would like to contribute to parenting education, specifically parental emotion coaching for families, to help parents create an optimal and healthy environment for their children. I hope that gaining insight into how parents can assist their children in navigating their emotions positively can lead to the creation of better and happier homes for families.