No abstract

In response to legislative mandates, the focus in early childhood special education has shifted from the child to the child in the context of the family. This shift has major implications for assessment as well as for intervention. In this article we describe an ecocultural approach for assessing families of young children with developmental problems. It is an approach that has grown out of empirical work and that we believe has clinical utility in designing interventions for young children and their families.

Although PL 99-45 7 mandates a family focus to early intervention, there is a limited theoretical and empirical base to guide implementation of the new law. Ecocultural theory, which considers the sociocultural environment of the child and family, is proposed as a framework for designing intervention. To illustrate this theory, case material is selected from two ongoing longitudinal studies of families with young children with developmental delays, etiologies unknown or uncertain. Several aspects of ecocultural theory are used to illustrate its usefulness for intervention: a social constructivist perspective; the interconnected and hierarchical nature of the ecocultural niche; and the use of family-level outcomes as well as individual child outcomes. Implications for developing Individual Family Service Plans are discussed.The family focus of PL 99-457 makes intuitive as well as conceptual sense; as such, it reflects the "best practices" in early intervention. Nevertheless, interventionists are rightly apprehensive as they take on this expanded role. Many of their concerns are practical. How comprehensive should the Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP) be in terms of delineating family "needs"? Where does professional responsibility end? What about accountability? The IFSP requires new approaches and practices from the many disciplines, institutions, and agencies that will be involved in serving young handicapped children and their families (Johnson, McGonigel, & Kaufmann, 1989). While practitioners in early childhood special education (ECSE) have a long history ofworking with families, many of the other disciplines involved in infant services do not have the same tradition. Thus, professionals in ECSE are increasingly being called upon to take a leadership role in this area. Already the field has rallied to develop guidelines and recommended practices for the development of IFSPs (Johnson et al., 1989). The task has been complicated by the fact that, until recently, theory and training in ECSE have focused almost exclusively on the individual child. This is largely because the prevailing paradigm in ECSE has been developmental psychology (Edgar, 1988), which has focused on child dimensions, usually conceptualized in relatively narrow cognitive terms Likewise, program evaluation in ECSE has been influenced almost exclusively by develop- 219

Child-driven and transactional models of child-family interactions were tested with 80 children who had developmental delays and their families. Children's cognitive competence, personal-social competence, behavior and communication "hassle," and family accommodations to the children were assessed at child ages 3, 7, and 11. Accommodations were summarized as internal (within the family) and external (use of outside resources) intensity and types. Results indicate that the longitudinal relationships between children's cognitive competence, personal-social competence, behavior and communication hassle, and family accommodations are best explained by a child-driven model. Implications for early intervention and for the need to consider both child and family outcomes are discussed.