Understanding Parents’ Experiences of their Child’s Assessment Process

In general, there is a need to obtain input from parents about their experience with their child’s assessment process to promote quality service provision. Indeed, parents are experts in their daily lives and bring valuable information regarding what issues they find important to the assessment process. However, our understanding of parents’ experiences of the entire assessment process, from initial contact with the clinician’s office to the final feedback meeting, is limited because much of research to date has explicitly focused on parents’ experiences of receiving their child’s diagnosis. This article extends our understanding by synthesizing the literature to delineate parents’ experiences of the assessment process that resulted in their child’s mental health and/or neurodevelopmental diagnosis and addresses all phases of the assessment process. Key practices affecting parents’ overall experiences within each phase of assessment are discussed and practical implications for clinical practice for clinical and school psychologists are offered.