Post #2 in category. We recommend reading posts in numerical order.

Parallel Assessment and Parallel Development are models of successful child development interventions shaped by biological, societal and cultural strategies for connection and learning. They are concerned not only with what a child can do, but with how the child comes to do it through human relationships, communication, guided experience, and meaningful and enjoyable learning.

These models place strong emphasis on interactions between child and adult, child and child, and child and environment. Learning is not treated as a private mental event but as something that unfolds through shared activity. In these ordinary moments, children learn how to learn, how to communicate, and how to take part in the social world.

At the center of this approach are Interactive Developmental Domains. These are not isolated compartments of development but living systems that continually influence one another.

• Sensory/Motor
• Emotion/Mood/Motivation
• Communication/Speech/Language
• Interpersonal Relationships/Social Development
• Cognition/Reasoning/Problem-Solving

No child has developmental problems or success in only one of these domains. Developmental domains are not constructed and do not function separately, so they should not be assessed or mediated separately. When a child reaches for a toy, there is attention, sensation, movement prediction, sensory processing, curiosity, emotion, intention, labeling, memory, meaning, prediction, and often the desire to share the experience with someone else. Each domain is active, and each shapes the others.

Parallel Assessment is the process of carefully observing these domain interactions as they happen. The child is observed with adults who guide and mediate, with other children, and also when alone. We watch how the child moves, feels, communicates, relates, and thinks, not as separate skills, but as intra-active and interactive patterns that work together in real situations. We also pay close attention to the environment itself, what it offers, what it demands and what makes it difficult for this particular child.

From these ongoing Parallel Assessment observations comes a closer and hopefully better understanding of the child’s functioning within and across developmental domains, and also the adult mediator’s understanding, connection and functioning with this child. Deeper understandings guide the GPPSP process, clarifying Goals, setting Priorities, identifying Prerequisites, choosing Strategies, and tracking Progress. Each of these grows out of what the child is actually experiencing, doing, and how they are changing over time, not from comparisons with standardized norms.

Parallel Assessment also turns the lens toward the significant adults in the child’s life. Parents, teachers and therapists observe not only the child but themselves, their own attitudes and expectations, their habits of interaction, their emotional responses, their ability to interest, engage with and motivate the child.

Small changes in how an adult observes, listens, speaks, moves, anticipates, waits, and structures an interaction and joint activity can make a big difference in how the child feels, connects and learns. As adults learn to adapt their mediation to become more empathic, more patient, more responsive, the child can become more successful and more at ease in their feelings, thinking, and behavior.

In later posts, I will describe brief examples of how Interactive Developmental Domains appear in real interventions using Parallel Assessment and Parallel Development. These will be small vignettes, each showing only a few developmental domain interactions. Overall, whole-child observations and strategies are far more complex, involving far more developmental domain interactions.

Changes in GPPSP are made as the child changes, as adults become more skilled and more successful, and as the child’s world shifts at home, at school, in therapy, and as changes occur in society’s value systems, demands, expectations, rules, resources and support networks.

What remains constant is the idea that functional development is not built in isolated pieces, but is woven together through movement, feeling, communication, relationship and thought during enjoyable mediated learning and play activities, and lived experiences of everyday life.

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