ISSUES IN ASSESSING DEVELOPMENT

The necessity for assessing the mental health of young children has been increasingly recognized as our society turns to planning for preventive and clinical mental-health services for all the children in the community. The developing interest in questions of prevention and service on a large scale demands that experts in the mentalhealth field face up to the problem of devising appropriate techniques for identification at an early age of those children who need and can benefit from various forms of special services. In an attempt to explore this problem, the Child Development Center undertook a research project seven years ago with the aim of constructing a schedule for the assessment of development during the first six years-one that would be useable by different professional groups in their evaluation of children. As a first step toward achieving this goal, a comprehensive outline based on psychoanalytic developmental psychology was tried out with a sample population of children who were attending a community nursery-school. The process of constructing a comprehensive assessment outline for a nonclinical population; the difficulties encountered in making decisions about some of the children; and the finding that most