Parent Awareness Skills Survey (PASS)
by Barry Bricklin, Ph.D.

Widely used by custody courts, this unique assessment tool tells you how well a parent responds to typical childcare situations. It is composed of 18 items, each describing a specific childcare dilemma. The clinician asks the parent how he or she would respond to each situation. The parent’s answer is recorded in the PASS administration booklet.
 
The survey provides six scores, which indicate the parent’s awareness of:

• The critical issues in a given situation
• Adequate solutions
• The need to communicate in a manner that the child can understand
• The value of acknowledging the child’s feelings
• The importance of the child’s own history in the present circumstance
• The need to pay attention to the child’s response and fine-tune one’s own response accordingly.
 
For each of these areas, the PASS generates 3 scores. The first score represents the parent’s spontaneous response; the second reflects his or her response to gentle, non-leading questions about each situation; and the third indicates parental responses to very direct questioning about the childcare dilemmas presented. This tiered scoring system allows you to make inferences about what the parent would do first, or reflexively, as opposed to what he or she might do under ideal circumstances.
 
The PASS can be administered and scored in 30 to 60 minutes. The completed Test Booklet (PASS-Book) serves as a legally admissible record of the parent evaluation. It contains the questions, answers as given by the parent, clinician’s notes, and scoring.