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To truly understand a child, we need to attend to the child as a whole human being living in the real world, not as a collection of isolated skills, deficits, or test scores. Both Parallel Assessment and Parallel Development involve ongoing, individualized processes of learning with the child, observing, listening, participating, and gradually discerning both the child’s unique strengths and the specific supports required to foster development and enhance the quality of the child’s life.

Rather than imposing standardized measures and category comparisons, Parallel Assessmentaims to enter the child’s world. It involves the careful creation of personalized assessment procedures, tools, and activities that are relevant, meaningful, and grounded in what the child enjoys, understands and can do or can try to do. The assessment is embedded in daily routines, familiar contexts, interpersonal relationships and lived experiences.

Assessment is inseparable from intervention (Parallel Development). It actively increases the likelihood of successful learning and development, improving the quality of life not only for the child but for the family and all those who care for and support them.

Parallel Assessment explicitly individualizes the assessment process itself, allowing those who work with the child to understand in an ongoing way this child’s specific strengths, emerging abilities, vulnerabilities, and needs and what will most effectively support their development at this moment in time.

Parallel Assessment and Parallel Development seek to improve not only the child’s quality of life, but also the well-being and daily experience of the child’s parents, family members and caregivers.

Areas of Learning and Life Parallel Assessment Seeks to Identify and Improve

Parallel Assessment aims to support the child’s development across a wide and interconnected range of domains, recognizing that progress in one area often depends on progress in others.

These include:

• Health and wellness, physical and emotional well-being

• Safety, with an appropriate sense of security

• Reducing isolation while increasing enjoyable, meaningful social engagement with adults, siblings and peers

• Managing stress and supporting emotional regulation

• Understanding and coping with changing contexts, routines and expectations

• Developing more successful and more spontaneous two-way communication, including understanding and navigating social cues

• Reducing frustration and unhelpful automatic responses, while increasing intentionality, confidence and competence, enhancing adaptation skills, and dealing with transitions, changes, and surprises

• Increasing empathy and the capacity to understand other people’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions

• Creating more interesting and successful activities, more meaningful collaborative learning experiences, and genuine social inclusion

• Learning how to play, for the child, and an equal developmental emphasis on the adult mediator learning, or re-learning, how to play

• Learning how to learn and learning to enjoy learning. Building scaffolds for higher, more complex learning

• Adult Partners in Development Improving the way they Connect and Mediate with the child and with each other, and learning to enjoy mediation

• Determining and implementing the most effective mediation attitudes and processes for interpersonal connection and learning with this specific child, for these goals and activities, and for future play, communication and learning experiences

• Increasing curiosity, interest and the desire to understand, for the child and for the child’s mediators, fostering active problem-solving and creativity

• Improving cognitive functioning in real-life, attention, memory, identifying goals, reasoning, and evaluating solutions in real life

• Strengthening the child’s agency, purpose and responsibility, as well as the child’s feelings of agency, purpose and responsibility

Supporting the Child’s Entire Development System

Parallel Assessment recognizes that a child does not develop in isolation. Parallel Assessment extends beyond the child to include the assessment of the entire network of adults involved in the child’s life.

It helps parents, family members, caregivers, teachers, therapists and physicians deepen their understanding of the whole child rather than focusing on fragmented behaviors, unnecessary categorizations of the child, or isolated goals.

It invites each member of the child’s development team to reflect on themselves, to better understand their own attitudes, behaviors, and interventions from the child’s point of view, and in light of the guiding goals, principles and contexts shaping the child’s learning and development.

Parallel assessment supports the construction, continual updating, and refinement of a living development plan that includes specific, relevant and achievable goals; clear priorities and prerequisites; effective strategies and meaningful indicators of progress and outcomes.

It helps each adult mediator form a more authentic and effective connection with this particular child and this child’s family, in service of helping the child grow and live a more fulfilling life.

Building and Sustaining an Effective Development Team

Parallel Assessment addresses the broader systems that shape this child’s opportunities. It helps organize and administer a more successful collaborative development team tailored to the needs of this specific child. It affirms the primacy of the child’s parents as central members of the development team. It helps identify the qualities of caregivers, teachers, therapists and physicians who would be the most nurturing, dedicated, talented and effective mediators and mentors.

It helps determine the most appropriate kinds of schools and classroom environments for this child at this time, the elements of the most necessary and effective treatment programs for this specific child at this point in their development.

It aims to strengthen advocacy efforts, helping to secure the services, resources and funding this particular child and their family need to thrive.

As we better understand this child, in their current and future contexts, we are far better equipped to help this child flourish.

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