Assessment in infancy and early childhood: New tools and perspectives.

Aim: PDM-2 has focused on the importance of a multi-informant approach in the assessment during infancy and early childhood. Traditionally, a fundamental support to children assessment has been given by their parents’ perception of them. This contribution sheds light on the importance to investigate if parents’ perception of their child’s abilities could depend on parenting stress and parental attachment style. Furthermore, following a multi-informant approach that considers clinician-report tools as a rich source of information for a complete assessment, the work also aims to introduce a new clinician-report tool, the Parent-Child Relationship Scale (P-CRS), which assess the individual and the overall contribution that parents and children give to the relationship. Methods: Two different studies will then be presented. In the first one, a sample of 357 mothers of one-year-old healthy infants was recruited and filled out three self-reports: Parenting Stress Index - Short Form, Attachment Style Questionnaire and First Year Inventory. In the second one, a sample of 268 mother-child dyads was observed and assessed by several clinicians using the P-CRS. Results: In the first study, the multiple regression analyses show that one of the parenting stress dimensions may contribute to the mother’s perception of child social communicative abilities and that different dimensions of parenting stress could contribute to mother’s perception of child’s sensory-regulatory functions, to which also attachment styles significantly contribute to. In the second study, factor analysis finds four dimensions for “Interaction”, two dimensions for “Parent” and two dimensions for “Child”, P-CRS areas. Moreover, many of these factors have been found well distinguish different aspects of the relationship among various kinds of psychopathological conditions. Discussion: Thus, our findings support the use of a multi-informant approach to the diagnosis during early childhood, to which the P-CRS may give an important contribution.