Life Skills Progression (LSP): An Outcome and Intervention Planning Instrument for Use with Families at Risk

See the new edition coming in July 2024!

For use with at-risk families of children from birth to 3 years of age, the Life Skills Progression™ (LSP) is the only reliable, field-tested tool that provides the critical data home visiting programs need to demonstrate their effectiveness and receive support and funding.

Generating a broad, accurate portrait of the behaviors, attitudes, and skills of both parents and children, the LSP helps professionals establish baseline client profiles, identify strengths and needs, plan interventions, and monitor outcomes to show that interventions are working.

View our recorded webinar: Improving Home Visiting Practice with the Life Skills Progression™ (LSP) presented by Linda Wollesen.

Home visitors use the LSP to measure a variety of family competencies. The tool is comprehensive and easy to use —in just 5–10 minutes, an experienced professional familiar with the family can record information on 43 scales in key categories:

• relationships with family and friends
• relationships with children
• physical health care
• basic needs
• education and employment
• mental health and substance abuse
• infant/toddler development and temperament

Home visitors rate each competency from 1 to 5 on a simple form, where they can also record important case data such as how many visits have been attempted or completed. No judgment of family choices is implied—the LSP is used only to track the progress of children and parents, and can be repeated every six months until the child is 3.

Everything professionals need to use the LSP is contained in this all-in-one manual, which includes information on the tool's development and field testing, best practices in the field, detailed instructions on proper use, and the photocopiable tool itself. For easy printing of copies, the tool and instructions chapter are included as downloable electronic files.

Ideal for social workers, public health nurses, mental health care providers, and other home visitors, this essential tool will help professionals identify the needs of the families they serve, monitor their improvements, and vividly demonstrate the effectiveness of home visiting programs. Learn more about the LSP.

Recommended by Parents as Teachers, the LSP meets the new affiliate requirements for family-centered assessment and goal setting.

Linda Wollesen focused her career on public health nursing and collaborative community-based services to low-income and ethnically diverse families. She worked as a nursing visitor in housing projects in East Los Angeles, nursing supervisor in Santa Clara, and program manager in Santa Cruz County, all in California. Her clinical expertise included services and care coordination for children and infants who have special needs or who are in foster care. She also supervised a research replication site for the David Olds Nurse-Family Partnership in Monterey County.

Ms. Wollesen was the developer of the Life Skills Progression™ (LSP) instrument and pioneered the reliability and content work for the tool with the support of a fellowship from ZERO TO THREE: National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families. She founded the Life Skill Outcomes, LLC, which provides LSP training and best practice consultation and developed an LSP database for use by programs using the LSP.

Karen Peifer, Ph.D., M.P.H., RN, became the program evaluation coordinator for the San Mateo County Prenatal To Three Initiative soon after finishing her doctorate in public health from the University of California at Berkeley. The Prenatal To Three Initiative is one of the premier multidisciplinary home visitation programs in the state of California that serves high- and moderate-risk low-income families. She directed and coordinated the evaluation efforts of this program. It is from this experience that she started working with Linda Wollesen on the Life Skills Progression (LSP) instrument and the writing of this book. She has taught nursing students at San Jose State University and has taught research methods to students in its Justice Studies Department. Currently, she is teaching graduate student nurses at the University of Colorado in Denver. Her research interests continue to be the social and emotional development of young children and the advancement of nursing in the field of infant mental health.