Mimir The core principle of filling out the children's mental health form is to faithfully restore the normal state of the child in the past 1 to 2 months. Don't deliberately beautify the performance in order to "not label the child", and don't over-exaggerate occasional problems just because you have recently come into contact with relevant science. There are actually two widely differing views on the filling-in scale. One is that filling in the information truthfully will leave a "problem record" that will affect the child's subsequent admission to kindergarten and further education, so the negative performance is deliberately concealed. The other is that only by making the problem more serious can doctors/evaluators pay more attention to it, and simply rely on occasional minor problems to normalized serious situations. In fact, both of these methods will make the evaluation completely lose its reference significance.
When I worked as an assessment assistant in a child psychology clinic, I saw too many situations where judgment was delayed due to wrong filling in the scale. There was a mother who took her 5-year-old daughter for a psychological screening before entering kindergarten. It was clear that the child cried for three days in a row last week because she resisted being separated from her family. When she meets strange children, she will hide behind her parents and not dare to speak. She fills in the form "Emotionally stable" When asked about "sexuality" and "social initiative", she directly checked "completely stable" and "very active", saying that she did not want to label the child as "timid" or "sensitive". As a result, after the child entered the kindergarten, he could not adapt to it for a month and cried and vomited every day. The teacher came over and went back to check the previous assessment records, only to find out how big the deviation was in the filling in at that time.
There are also many parents who fall into another trap. There was a father who took his 7-year-old son for an attention test. He had just watched a few popular science videos about ADHD. He was very anxious when he saw that his son couldn't sit still while doing homework. When filling out the form, he checked all the options related to attention to the most serious level, saying that the child must have ADHD. After careful investigation, I found out that the only time the child could not sit still was when doing homework. When playing Lego or reading his or her favorite popular science picture books, it was okay to wait quietly for an hour and a half. This way of filling in the form, which treats special performances in specific scenes as daily routines, naturally made the final evaluation results of little reference value.
If you are filling in a self-report scale that requires children in grade 3 or above to answer on their own, don’t stare at the supervisor, let alone change the answers. There was a 10-year-old girl who filled out an emotion-related scale before, and just after she selected “Occasionally I feel like no one understands me,” her mother patted her arm anxiously and said, “We surround you every day, how could you have such thoughts? Change it soon.” The final scale submitted was all full-score options. However, as soon as the little girl entered the assessment room to communicate alone, she burst into tears and said that if she usually said something different, her parents would scold her for being “ignorant.” She did not dare to tell the truth. This kind of filled-out scale was just a piece of waste paper to put it bluntly.
Don’t worry if you encounter an ambiguous option that you don’t know how to choose. Most scales now have a remarks column at the end. You can just write down the specific scenario clearly. For example, if you encounter a question like “Does your child often lose his temper?” You will only get emotional when you are wronged, or when you cannot finish your homework and are pushed. Usually, your mood is stable when you are playing with children or doing things you like. Just write this situation in the notes, which is much more useful than the ambiguous options you have to choose for a long time. In fact, to put it bluntly, filling out this form is to take a bare-faced snapshot of the child's mental state. If you add ten levels of skin resurfacing, or deliberately apply a gray face, it will not allow the assessor to see the true situation. Instead, the effort of doing the assessment will be wasted. Just fill in the true state as you usually see it. If there is a problem, it will be discovered and adjusted early. If there is no problem, you can have peace of mind without being too burdened.
