Our approach

Approach to Assessment

At Attachment Matters our approach recognises that children and young people often present with complex and overlapping developmental needs. We believe that psychological assessment should be thorough, coordinated, and clinically meaningful — not fragmented or unnecessarily prolonged.

Many children access early intervention supports without a formal diagnosis in the early years. However, as they grow older, continued access to services, school adjustments, and funding pathways often requires diagnostic clarity. At the same time, timely and comprehensive developmental assessments can be difficult to access across both public and private sectors.

Too often, assessment occurs in a piecemeal fashion. Multiple costly tests may be conducted separately, each examining only one aspect of learning or behaviour. This can delay diagnostic formulation, complicate the developmental picture, and increase financial burden for families — sometimes without delivering clear answers.

A Comprehensive Developmental Assessment Model

To address these challenges, we offer a structured Comprehensive Developmental Assessment designed to provide a rigorous, integrated understanding of a child’s psychological functioning. Our model brings together multiple domains of assessment within a single coordinated process, supporting timely and accurate diagnostic decision-making.

This package may include:

  • Collation and review of relevant health, educational, and therapeutic records

  • Multi-informant interviews across key environments in the child’s life

  • Administration of preliminary screening measures to guide assessment focus

  • Formal assessment of executive functioning, including ADHD, using standardised measures such as the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function, Second Edition (BRIEF-2)

  • Standardised assessment of trauma symptoms using validated trauma symptom checklists

  • Formal cognitive assessment using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children – Fifth Edition (wisc-5 intelligence test"] or appropriate non-verbal measures

  • Formal assessment of adaptive functioning using the Adaptive Behavior Assessment System, Third Edition (ABAS-3)

Supporting Diagnostic Clarity

This integrated assessment model is designed to support diagnosing clinicians in identifying:

  • Disorders of executive dysfunction, including ADHD

  • Post-traumatic and/or complex trauma presentations

  • Intellectual Developmental Disorder (Intellectual Disability)

  • Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), where confirmed prenatal alcohol exposure exists, three domains of clinically significant impairment are identified through assessment outcomes, and a Paediatrician directs or endorses the findings as part of their clinical evaluation

Where assessment findings indicate the possible presence of Autism Spectrum Disorder, and a Paediatrician concurs and formally requests further evaluation, a final assessment using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, Second Edition (ADOS-2) may be added as a supplementary component.

Child-Centred, Integrated, Collaborative

Our approach prioritises clarity, collaboration, and clinical integrity. By integrating multiple domains within one coordinated process, we aim to reduce unnecessary delays, minimise duplication of cost, and provide clear guidance to families, educators, medical professionals, and funding bodies.

Most importantly, every assessment remains child-centred — recognising each child’s unique developmental pathway and ensuring that recommendations are practical, strengths-informed, and responsive to the environments in which they live and learn.

Approach to Services

Attachment Matters Psychologists and Counsellors use a developmentalist approach based on findings from attachment, neuro-scientific, and functional behaviourist, research. We hold that the experiences individuals have from the point of conception, to around five years after birth, are initially processed in the brain at a sensory level, and combine with genetic elements to create neural pathways which link and activate different parts of the brain and body, including via the central nervous system.

When similar experiences are repeated in the early years, neural pathways become reinforced, leading to increasingly strong links between certain perceptions, emotions, physical reactions, thoughts/cognitions, and behaviour. Strong links can then become habituated into automatic patterns of functioning, for better or worse, across later childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

Sometimes permanent patterns of functioning are adaptive, and we can navigate the ups and downs of life with resilience, healthy coping, pleasure, and satisfaction. Other times they aren’t, and we can be left vulnerable to stress and reliant on less healthy coping. We might even find ourselves stuck repeating old cycles of behaviour, feeling unable to break free of habits we no longer want. The good news is that even after childhood the brain continues to build pathways, so, with hard work and targeted intervention old patterns can be re-wired, and behaviour changed.

The understanding that psychological functioning has its origins in very early development and contributes to life-long health has slowly but surely permeated service delivery in Australian communities over the last two decades. And the implications have been clear; child-caregiver relationships are the most potent factor for laying the foundations of mental and physical health in early childhood which last across the lifespan. Because of this, while children are central to the services we provide, their caregivers are central to every intervention. As such, our child-centred family services typically require the participation of children and their most special grown-ups.

Resources

Attachment Matters Psychologists and Counsellors continue to consume, integrate, and be informed by the most current research findings published across the fields of attachment, neuro-developmental psychology, behaviourism, and counselling.

We highly value the contributions made by the following individuals and organisations, and appreciate the varied ways they have influenced our sector and approach:

While our approach is aligned on many issues with the views of the above services or people, links to other sites are not unconditionally endorsed by Attachment Matters. We are not accountable for content on linked sites or your access to those sites via the links. We are not affiliated, associated, authorised, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with the above people or services.