Mothers' evaluation of their kindergarten children's developmental status

The question whether parents are able to assess their children's development accurately is one that repeatedly comes up in applied developmental psychology research and is a subject of controversial debate. On the one hand, parents are regarded as experts and the information they give is considered to be more relevant than that gathered in tests of the child, on the other hand, empirical findings have shown that parents tend to overestimate their children's development. The aim of this study is to examine whether the assessment of mothers regarding the development of their child differs when mothers of children who are normally developed and mothers of children with behavioral problems are questioned. To this end, the state of development of kindergarten children (3 to 6 years old) with behavioral problems (n = 40) as well as children in the same age group with normal behavior (n = 40) were tested with the Wiener Entwicklungstest (WET, Kastner-Koller & Deimann, 2002), a developmental test for children 3 to 6 years old. At the same time, for each subtest of the WET, mothers were asked to estimate what their child would be able to solve. The comparison of the maternal estimations with actual performance of the child supports the view that parents ascribe a higher stage of development to their children than that actually achieved, but that mothers of children with behavioral problems over-estimate to a significantly greater degree than mothers of children with normal behavior.