Push a button to monitor your child's progress

Brock University research aims to help parents better track child development, according to a news release. A new Brock study will allow parents to monitor their child’s progression through early developmental stages with only the touch of a button.

Professor Maurice Feldman in the Departments of Applied Disability Studies and Child and Youth Studies wants to provide parents with an innovative way to track their infant’s development using a web-based version of the Parent Observation Checklist (POC) questionnaire. The POC is a version of the Parent Observation of Early Markers Scale (POEMS), which detects early child development. Having seen its effectiveness when completed on paper, by phone interview and via email, Feldman and his research team now seek to test it as an online survey.

The research team includes Associate Professor and co-investigator Tricia Vause and second-year PhD student and research assistant Brianna Anderson in Child and Youth Studies.

“Parents are skilled at monitoring their child’s development and have told us the POC helps them focus on a range of child behaviours in the first three years of life,” says Feldman. “Using the POC, parents were able to detect which children were at risk for being diagnosed with autism at age three as early as nine months of age.”

Anderson explains that the POC covers 61 items related to child development, such as feeding and communication, which are scored on a four-point scale. Participating parents also answer questions related to family history. They complete the questionnaire every month until their child turns three, updating only those items that have changed.

The research team is now recruiting parents of children between one and 24 months to complete the questionnaire, using their personal computers or smartphones, updating it on a monthly basis until their child reaches 36 months of age. The survey takes about 20 minutes to complete each time. There is no cost to take part in the study, but there are many potential benefits. Anderson says the questionnaire can help families understand their infant’s development and even flag any early developmental concerns that arise. “Parents may feel empowered being able to track their child’s development in a systematic way,” says Anderson.