Appalled by Denver Developmental Screening Test

[SpiderMum]

A friend of mine recently had a social worker give her toddler the Denver Developmental Screening Test and one of the tasks was for a child to feed a doll with a bottle. The worker told her that she was SUPPOSED to "fail" the child if they child nursed the doll instead of giving a bottle, however that particular worker didn't agree with that at all and wouldn't do it.

I am APPALLED by this! My child wouldn't know what to do with a bottle! She's never seen one! My friend was also horrified, even though she did end up bottlefeeding her toddler and wants to write some letters to the person who created the test. I thought my fellow Lactavists would like to know about this also...

http://www.medterms.com/script/main/...rticlekey=9719
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_...Screening_Test
http://www.denverii.com/

[AFWife]

That's ridiculous. Fail a child for mimicking properly? Isn't that part of the point of a developmental test????

[lynsage]

I just looked this up and apparently the cultural bias of the Denver test is at least somewhat well-known. This paper describes several aspects of the test that were totally irrelvant for evaluating children in rural Malawi, the "Social" portion of which clearly includes "Feed doll" which means feeding the doll with a baby bottle.

http://adc.bmj.com/content/93/1/23.full.pdf

It sounds to me like the child would only fail that single item, not the entire test or even that category of the test, but still, it is clearly heavily culturally biased and I hope that more awareness is brought to this issue so that the test can be modified.

I am on Youtube right now looking for the training video for administering the Denver. It's possible that the instructions were to fail the child on feeding the doll if they did anything but give the doll the bottle, which is still ridiculous but might not be specifically engineered to exclude nursing the doll.

ETA: We throw away bottles that come with baby dolls in our house so I'm sure my daughter would not only "fail", but give the social worker an earful about formula being bad for babies and the superiority of boobies!

[proudmomof4]

Train them early, huh?

Anyway, I only crossread your linked article but it seems to be a good example of intercultural training and learning.