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A Highly Subjective and Intuitive Ongoing Assessment
In working with children with developmental disabilities, we search for tools, strategies, and systems that can guide their growth and our own.
Over the years, I have put into practice a framework I call Parallel Development, which recognizes the deeply interconnected growth of the child and the adults who care for, play with, motivate, and instruct them. Within this framework, Parallel Assessment is not merely a complementary technique; it is part of the unified and comprehensive developmental process itself.
Parallel Assessment is a framework that serves multiple purposes. Its central aim is to help us to know and to understand the child more deeply, on personal, interpersonal and functional levels. It moves beyond standardized testing and surface observations.
Rather than over-focusing on measurements, quantities, scores, labels, and categories, we seek to better understand qualities and how to enhance the interactive organization and development of this unique child’s mind.
While interacting with this particular child, we closely observe how the child is focusing their attention, what feelings they are experiencing, what they are thinking about and what reasoning processes they are engaging in, what are their intentions and their actions within a particular context, with a specific activity to perform or problem to be solved.
We focus on the quality and feel of their communication, on their interests and motivations, on their planning, hesitations, learning strategies and the emotional tone of their interpersonal relationships.
Parallel Assessment: an ongoing, formative assessment process
Parallel Assessment is not something reserved for formal educational or clinical settings. It is formative and ongoing. It takes place every time an adult and this child interact. Every shared task, every moment of play or challenge in all of the child’s locations and activities is an opportunity for the interacting adult to observe, to listen, to reflect.
Parallel Assessment also takes place when the child is not engaged in interpersonal interactions. We quietly observe the child during transitions, when the child is involved in solitary activities, and in the ways the child engages with their environment when no adult is actively mediating. These moments often reveal subtle shifts in behavior, emerging skills, or internal states that might be missed during more structured settings.
Parallel Assessment and all Interactive Developmental Domains
The child’s skills and capacities, motor, sensory, emotional, communicative, social, and cognitive, are not considered static traits, but rather dynamic states. They change and evolve with improved health, appropriate mediation, successful real-life experiences, interesting, practical, real-world practice and problem-solving.
Parallel Assessment of the Child and of the Child’s Mediators
But assessment does not stop with the child. It proceeds in tandem with the adult’s own self-assessment, their capacity to connect, to communicate, to guide, to adapt, to interest, to motivate and to instruct. In this sense, Parallel Assessment is a mirror. What we observe in the child reflects what we must examine in ourselves.
How are our interactions shaping their development? How are our assumptions, our strengths, and our struggles influencing the child’s progress? How is our ability to communicate, to connect, to interest and to motivate, to instruct and to mediate, influencing this child’s self-esteem, their learning and development?
Through this ongoing reflection, we evaluate not only the child’s changing abilities but also our own growing awareness and evolving skills as guides and mediators. We examine the interpersonal relationships themselves: how the child communicates and connects with each significant adult, and how each adult communicates and connects with the child. The relationship is the medium through which development flows.
Parallel Assessment helps to Identify and Construct Goals, Priorities, Prerequisites, Strategies, and Progress (GPPSP)
Parallel Assessment helps us design and refine the conditions that foster the child’s practical, integrated growth. It informs decisions about goals, essential prerequisites, current priorities, strategies, therapies, educational approaches, and forms of successful mediation, and helps evaluate progress so changes can be made. It helps us identify what’s working, what needs adjusting and whether we are moving in the right direction.
We examine the child’s developmental domains, sensory and motor skills, emotional regulation and motivation, communication and language, relational awareness, cognition and problem-solving, adaptability and flexibility. We also look at the changing integration within and across domains. How do these aspects of development intersect and influence each other? What does this mean for how we teach, support and interact with the child?
In this model, the child’s physical health, neurological well-being, emotional state, increasing learning capacity, and real-world functioning are all part of one fabric. And this fabric very much includes the inner lives of the adults who support this child’s interests, fears, hopes, uncertainties and growth.
Just as the child’s confusion, fear and isolation can slow the child’s development, confusion, fear and isolation in the adult can affect the adult’s ability to engage, to plan, to manage and to mediate. But when the adult becomes more understanding of the child and of themselves, more confident and connected, the child becomes more engaged, more motivated and more capable of progress.
Ultimately, Parallel Assessment helps us align all our efforts toward one purpose, to support the child in building a meaningful, purposeful and fulfilling life. It enhances not only the life of the child but also the lives of parents, caregivers and family members. It is not a checklist or a diagnostic form. It is a way of seeing, of listening, of learning and of evolving together.
By attending to the development of all involved, and by recognizing the reciprocity of every relationship, ongoing Parallel Assessment supports every aspect of Parallel Development of the child and the adults who parent, teach and treat the child.
Copyright © 2025 Shlomo Chaim
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