Assessing the condition of children

Abstract

Proposed child welfare legislation challenges states to initiate new programs to help children who have been neglected, abused, or abandoned by their parents. This paper describes ways to appraise the condition of children and the functioning of families in order to evaluate the effects of child welfare reform efforts. The assessment approach grows out of a “whole child” perspective, encompassing physical health, cognitive development, emotional well-being, and moral development and social behavior. Specific measures to assess these aspects of child development are described, most of which have shown meaningful differences between groups in large-scale studies. However, child welfare situations present special challenges: the difficulty of reliably assessing the developmental status of young children; applicability of measures to low-income and minority children and very dysfunctional families; and the problem of obtaining accurate, unbiased information from parents. Several research strategies are proposed to combat these difficulties. One promising development for the future of child welfare evaluations is that a number of these strategies have been incorporated into large-scale, longitudinal evaluation studies of welfare-to-work, child care, and integrated service delivery programs.