Parents' ratings of everyday cognitive abilities in very low birth weight children

Parents' ratings of everyday cognitive functioning in very low birth weight (VLBW) children free of sensorineural impairments and normal birth weight (NBW) children were compared with the children's actual performance on psyc hometric measures of cognitive and motor skills, Subjects included 19 VLBW children identified at age 3 years as "suspect" for developmental problems, 19 VLBW children identified at age 3 years as "developing normally," and 3 0 NBW full-term peers. Results indicated that parents of the suspect VLBW g roup rated their children as having significant impairments in memory, lang uage, cognitive, and motor skills, findings which were consistent with the results of concurrent psychometric assessments. When compared with psychome tric test results, parents identified more children as displaying difficult ies in memory, language, and cognitive skills, but fewer children with coor dination difficulties. These findings suggest that the parents' ratings and the psychometric measures may be assessing somewhat different aspects of t he children's functioning.