Life Skills Progression Brief: Information and Guidelines for Use in Meeting Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Benchmarks

The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program (MIECHV) requires awardees to collect and report on data in six benchmark areas related to children and families. To meet this mandate, many awardees proposed using an outcome summary tool called Life Skills Progression (LSP) to measure progress in multiple constructs.

LSP helps home visitors to gather and organize information about family competences and to create service plans customized to families’ strengths and needs. The tool relies on information gathered from a variety of sources:

• Referrals
• Interview and conversations
• Observations of family functioning
• Formal assessments
• Selected screening tools

This brief describes the instrument and its potential use by MIECHV awardees. A table notes which LSP items can be used to measure specific benchmark constructs and when home visitors need additional information from interviews, questions, or screening tools to score an item.