Parental vs. Professional Assessment of Developmentally Delayed Children After Periods of Parent Training

This study reports changes in parents' abilities to assess their children's status in five developmental domains while participating in a parent-child training project. Thirty-one developmentally delayed children between the ages of 1 and 27 months at the time of the initial assessment were included. Each child was assessed four times at approximately 4-month intervals by two sources: his/her parent(s) and a team of professionals. No differences were found between parent and professional scores at any time in the motor, social, and language domains. Differences found in the initial test of the self-help domain disappeared after 4 months of parent training, while differences in the cognitive domain took an average of 12 months to resolve. The results support the hypothesis that parents tend to overestimate their child's developmental status.