Video Evidence for In-Home Assessments

Advocate, Larry Rosen gives you tips on providing video evidence to your social worker during your child’s in-home assessment. Social workers’ time is limited and providing video evidence can help show your child has a deficit in orientation, memory, judgment and/or lack of mental functioning.

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Video Transcription & Notes:

Another strategy that I have is videotaping your child. Not videotaping a child doing behavior, but videotaping your child answering questions.

Example From A Client

I today witness the video of a twelve-year-old child who was ask very simple questions like, “what are the names your closest relatives?”, “what your birthday?”, “what’s your address?”. Throughout the entire video, what I witnessed was a child just absolutely laughing and couldn’t focus whatsoever at all on anything except laughing. The video was approximately two minutes long. What I got out of the video is that it was difficult to engage the child in any type of bona fide questioning and that they had a mental impairment.

Video Evidence of Lack of Mental Functioning

Due to a mental impairment, they had the inability to focus in on the task at hand. To me that demonstrated weather it be as a result of a deficit in orientation or deficit in memory or maybe even judgment. It clearly showed that the child had a lack of mental functioning.

Do Not Stage the Recording

In those events where you don’t have a social worker that can view your child for a good period of time, you might want to try providing some type of video evidence that’s not evidence of actual behavior. Because the problem with actual behavior is if you’re not showing yourself taking preventive action to stop the behavior, it looks like showboating. You don’t want to make it look like you’re trying to stage something.

Ask Simple Questions A Child of That Age Should Know

Having your child sit at a table and they’re completely calm, and you’re asking him/her questions and they’re not answering the questions appropriately; that just establishes a lack of mental functioning.

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