Are parents of school-age children with specific language impairments accurate estimators of their child’s language skills?

This study was designed to examine the relative accuracy of parents’ estimations of the language skills of school-age children (ages 5-7) with and without language impairments. The parents of children with language impairments were more accurate estimators than the parents of normally developing children in terms of the correspondence of absolute ratings of language skills, but less accurate in terms of correlations of ratings with standardized test scores. Parent ratings were not significantly correlated with teacher ratings in either group. Definitions of accuracy of estimations and their implications are discussed in terms of the role of parents in the identification of children’s language needs, both for formal intervention and for day-to-day language stimulation.