Thus far, nearly 75 families have fully completed the age thirty month assessment, with many more in the wings this winter and spring. As their toddlers inched toward the next new horizons - kindergarten, grade school, and beyond, a question we'd been asked by many of these families was: "So what happens now? Will we ever see you again?"
Our answer, until recently, had been an honest, "We're not entirely sure what the future holds, but we will let you know when we do make plans to touch base with families again in the future". That time has come! Together with an international team of researchers, including top family psychologists from France and Switzerland, we have designed a kindergarten-age home visit for any families who would be interested in welcoming our team to their home one more time, and to date have seen almost two dozen families for these late preschool/early indergarten visits.
Here's what participant families can expect: As the child we have been following turns 54 months of age (age 4 ½), the family will receive a flyer in the mail announcing the follow-up. Shortly after the flyer arrives, either Preschool Project Coordinator Rebecca Jorgensen or a fellow staff member contacts the family by phone to determine whether they'd be interested in inviting us to their homes for a one-time visit. In order to sample a representative slice of family life, Rebecca and her preschool team colleague David Shaw will seek to come out to visit each family around the time of a morning, afternoon, or evening meal when all family members will be present. Rebecca and Dave set up a small video camera in each family's mealtime area to capture what, hopefully, would be a reasonably typical family mealtime interaction, and then adjourns to a different part of the home to set up for our assessment of the preschooler.
After the meal, Rebecca spends about 45 minutes with the preschooler gathering information about the child's verbal skills, and about his or her ideas about relationships, about feelings and emotions, and about handling challenges. While this assessment is going on, Dave talks with parents about how the child and family have been faring since the 30-month assessment, and has parents complete a handful of (short!) surveys for us. There is no homework, or visits to Clark this time around!!
As in earlier visits, families receive a report describing our assessment of their son or daughter. We also have a small prize to give the preschooler (and a little something for any siblings). And, following up on suggestions we received from families during earlier assessment periods, we are also glad to provide any individualized, follow-up consultation to families on questions or issues for which they might wish to receive feedback. Rebecca gives each family a short form to complete after the visit, on which to list any topics or areas of interest or concern, and a senior staff member follows up shortly thereafter via phone call. If the family expresses interest, we're also glad to provide a further phone or in-person consult, free of charge!
We invite you to visit this web page periodically, and to consult future editions of the project newsletter, for updates about the follow-up. Participation in the preschool/kindergarten visit is completely voluntary and optional, of course! We also wish to thank those families who provided creative ideas or input for us about the kinds of activities they thought would be interesting and instructive to include in our preschool home visit. Families' ideas have helped strengthen the study greatly over the years, and as always, we continue to welcome and appreciate the thoughts of all of you who are helping to make this important and ground-breaking study possible!