Speaking at an event hosted by the Mothercraft College of Early Childhood Education, KPE Professor John Cairney talked about the work his team of researchers has been doing on creating the Early Years Check-In (EYCI), a new tool that measures parent concerns regarding children’s development.
Cairney led the scientific team that created the tool for the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services as part of Ontario’s Special Needs Strategy, an engagement tactic to better support Ontario families in the early years.
“The purpose was to create a simple tool that parents could complete for their children between the ages of six to 18 months and six years as part of a process for screening for developmental concerns,” says Cairney.
The researchers found that parental concerns elicited by the EYCI correlated very well with objective measures of developmental delay, reinforcing the importance of taking parental concerns seriously and acting on them to support child development, says Cairney.
“Our tool fills a gap by specifically asking about concerns parents may have in areas as diverse as motor, language, cognition and social-emotional development,” he says.
“It can be used alongside other measures designed to screen for developmental delay in infants and children, but it gives a voice to parents who may be feeling worried about their child’s development and want to seek help.”
So far, EYCI is the only tool of its kind in Canada and it’s easy and quick to complete.
“Many tools that measure children’s milestones require parents to provide a yes or no answer, however our research has shown that parents often have trouble making yes or no decisions,” says Cairney. “Our scale allows parents to place a mark along a continuum of concern.”
Instead of a yes or no, the tool produces a score for each item that ranges from 0 to 100.
“This increases variability in response, which in turn means that we can better capture variability in the child's development,” says Cairney, whose team is currently evaluating a roll-out of the tool across Ontario in different communities.