Special Needs

National Effective Parenting Initiative

Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect of Children with Special Needs

Children with special needs and other disabilities are at increased risk for being abused and neglected.

The best way to help prevent these children from being hurt is to find them as early in life as possible and get them and their families into early intervention community service programs.

Finding or identifying children with special needs early in life is a two-step process.

First is developmental screening to find out if a young child may have special needs. There are now online questionnaires that can be completed by parents or other adults who know a child who they suspect has special needs.

Two such questionnaires are the Parent's Evaluation of Developmental Status (PEDS) and the CICC Discovery Tool. Both provide print outs of results.

Using these inexpensive alerting and screening questionnaires help to determine whether a child birth to 5 or 8 years may have special needs that require professional attention.

If the print out of the results does indeed suggest that a child may have special needs, the second step in the early identification process comes into play. That step involves having the child seen by an appropriate professional like a licensed psychologist to have an in-person developmental assessment conducted on the child. If that assessment of the child reveals the presence of any special needs or developmental delays, then the family can be directed to the best early intervention programs in their area.

Those community service programs provide parents with the support and training to relate to their needy children in positive ways, thereby reducing the risk of their children being abused or neglected.

Finding a psychologist to conduct a developmental assessment can be done through contacting the American Psychological Association Information Service at 1 (800) 964-2000, or directly contacting your state psychological association.

Early intervention programs for infants and toddlers with special needs, or who are at high risk for developing special needs, can be found by contacting your state’s coordinator for such programs who are called Part C Coordinators.

Click here to find your state's Part C Coordinator.

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