Family Assessments

One of the primary goals of the New York State Early Intervention Program (EIP) is to be family-centered. EIP promises to provide support and services to a family, as well as their child with a disability, with services that respect a family's culture, their concerns, priorities and resources. 

A family assessment includes a review of several areas:

• A family's resources—the strengths, abilities, and support that a family can use to improve the child's development.
• A family's priorities—the outcomes the family most want from early intervention services.
• Family concerns—the problems or needs a family want to work on. 

A good family assessment can be essential to creating outcomes in your IFSP that meet your families needs and leads to more meaningful services. The family assessment is voluntary. All information that is shared is kept private. You decide what information, if any, to include in the IFSP.

An easy way to prepare for a family assessment is to take a piece of paper and create a table with the following headers:

Then, look at your typical day; start with getting up in the morning, who is there? What is going well about getting up, what is challenging?  Then on to getting your child dressed, eating breakfast, running errands, childcare, etc., just run through your entire day.  You can think about other things that you do that are not part of your typical day—weekly religious worship, family events, trips to restaurants and the like.  It is important to think about what is going well, who or what can support your child with a disability.  Each person who is a primary caregiver should do this—both parents, babysitters, and grandparents if they care for your child, etc. 

Concerns

Once you've created your table, you can go back and see where you might have concerns. Going to a grocery store may be difficult because of the amount of noise; giving your child a bath may be challenging because at 15 months old your son is still not sitting up on his own. Conversely, eating breakfast might be going well, because the whole family is together and you can take turns eating and feeding your son.

Priorities

From your list of concerns you can begin to decide which ones are most important to you and your family.  Go back and put a star next to the 3-5 most important concerns.  Each family has their own concerns and priorities.  To create an Individual Family Service Plan (IFSP) that meets your needs you really should take the time to identify your concerns and your priorities.  This will make it easier to help your early intervention providers to help you.  Your providers have a wealth of information about child development and how to help your child learn new skills.  For the plan to be family-centered, your providers need to know what is important to your family. 

Resources

Listing what you and your family are doing on a typical day; what is working and what is challenging; you will begin to see who or what could be a good resource for each task.  For example, in your grocery store they may have a child-sized shopping cart, or the guy who stacks fruit might be really friendly and might be willing to learn to say hello each time you visit.  Another example is that one parent may have an easier time getting your son into bed, while another is better at dealing with the middle of the night issues.  Your son may do things more willingly when asked by a grandparent, or a sibling may be great at getting your son to use his imagination.

Making a plan

Once you have your list; with its starred priorities and notes about resources, you are ready to sit down with your team and have a formal family assessment.  The early intervention program requires that the early intervention provider that sits down with you to do the family assessment has certain training.  As with all early intervention meetings you can invite anyone you would like to your meeting—just make sure you tell your team how many people will be there.  The more people in the meeting the more time you will need!  Having your list in front of you will help organize your thoughts.  Being prepared before your family assessment will make it easier to answer the questions.  From this information you and your IFSP team will begin to develop your family's functional outcomes.  A good family assessment can be essential to creating outcomes in your IFSP that addresses your family's concerns, priorities and resources.  Remember, concerns lead to priorities, looking at what's working leads to resources and each of these inform outcomes. Well thought out outcomes lead to more meaningful services.