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Identify and Understand Your Child’s Developmental Profile

All children with special needs have developmental milestones that need improvement, no matter the diagnosis. And even with the same diagnosis children have different challenges and weaknesses.

A child who struggles with attending and communicating may find the world overwhelming, too noisy, too fast moving; another child struggling with the same issues may find the world too dull and understimulating. Same symptom, very different intervention. The first child needs a calmer, slowed down world; the other needs a more energized world. Both children need the world to embrace them where they are biologically.

Knowing your child’s developmental profile—-in this case, whether a child needs a calm and patient “tortoise” parent or an energized and animated “hare” parent—-is of critical importance.

The Greenspan Assessment and Your Child’s Developmental Profile

The Greenspan Assessment is a tool developed by Dr. Stanley Greenspan and Jake Greenspan that helps you learn how your child processes information from the world around them, and provides you with a baseline profile of your child’s strengths and weaknesses.

There are two parts to the Greenspan Assessment:

• The developmental questionnaire focuses on emotional and intellectual abilities.
• The sensory processing questionnaire focuses on how children process what they see, hear, touch, smell, and taste, as well as how they move.

The questionnaires have straightforward and easy-to-answer questions. They are available to take year-round, as many times as you like.

A chart at the end displays the results and an interpretation of the results. The results chart lets you track changes over time, so you can see how your child improves with various interventions.

When your child has a stumbling block in development, regardless of the reason, it is unlikely to get better on its own. The more information you have, the better you will understand what your child needs and will be able to be a partner in supporting him or her and overcoming challenges.

To test the reliability of the parents’ answers, their scores were compared to Dr. Greenspan’s. In all three groups of children—-those with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, those with Regulatory Disorder, and those functioning optimally—-the parents’ scores were similar to Dr. Greenspan’s, with no more than a one-point difference in a few instances and some .5 differences.

The questionnaires are free the first time you fill them out, with no obligation to pay.