KIPS Blog: Parenting Assessment in Practice & Research

The research is clear, parenting is critical to a child’s successful development.  That is why so many of you work so hard to promote high quality parenting in the families you serve.  Since parenting is a major goal in family service programs, it makes sense to adopt a parenting assessment to guide services with families and to document their outcomes.  While being trained to assess parenting, many family service providers tell us that careful observation of parent-child interaction is a very new experience for them, and that it really opens their eyes to valuable insights they hadn’t thought of before training.  These insights then guide their work with families.

When you first start working with a family, how do you know what skills parents bring to their interactions with their children? How do you know which direction they need to go to be the best parent they can be? How do you help them respond to the individual needs of each one of their children?  As we’ve discussed previously, there are a range of assessment tools available to help you.  However, if you’re interested in assessing what really matters to children, you need to observe and assess the parents in action.  After all, it is the parents’ behavior that the child experiences.