Can We Identify Parents Who Do Not Verbally Share Concerns for Their Children's Development?

OBJECTIVE:We aimed to identify characteristics of parents who do not voice developmental concerns when prompted by their children's nurse and/or primary care provider (PCP), despite reporting concerns on parent-completed questionnaires. METHODS:We reviewed 376 medical records of children seen for a 9-month well-child visit in an urban pediatric clinic between September 2011 and December 2012 for sociodemographic variables hypothesized to affect parents' sharing of developmental concerns: the child's birth order and gender; parents' education level, employment, relationship status, and primary language; and family size and racial/ethnic background. The target population was parents who reported concerns on the Parents' Evaluation of Developmental Status (PEDS), a routinely administered, parent-completed screening questionnaire. We subdivided parents who reported concerns on the PEDS (N = 86) based on whether they voiced developmental concerns when prompted by their children's nurse and/or PCP. Two-sided Fisher's exact tests and logistic regression evaluated the relationship between sociodemographic variables and parents' voicing of developmental concerns. RESULTS:Only parent education approached significance, as parents with less than a high school education (更多