Diversity-Informed Practice for Parent/Caregiver Relationship Assessment

Understanding children in the context of relationships is central to the Infant Mental Health (IMH) assessment. This chapter will review core components of caregiver-child relationship assessments, highlighting the impact of social, economic, cultural, historical, and political contexts on these relationships, the family-assessor relationship, and the assessor’s interpretation of the relationship. Paradigms, including DC:0–5™’s Cultural Formulation (ZERO TO THREE, Diagnostic classification of mental health and developmental disorders of infancy and early childhood. Revised edition (DC:0–5). Author, 2016) and the Irving Harris Foundation Diversity-Informed Tenets (St. John MS, Thomas K, Noroña CR, ZERO TO THREE J 33(2):13–22, 2012), will be used to support the assessor cultivating cultural humility and critical self-reflection and to increase the assessor’s appreciation of complexities within the caregiver–child relationship while decreasing bias.