How to Fill Out and Return the SPM-2 Child Home Form

To fill out the SPM-2 Child Home Form, work through each listed behavior and mark how often you have seen it over the past month using one of four options: Never, Occasionally, Frequently, or Always. Base every rating on what your child does on their own, without coaching, during ordinary routines like meals, chores, and play. The form takes about 15 to 20 minutes, and the clinician who gave it to you handles all of the scoring afterward.¹

Start With the Identifying Information

The top of the form asks for basic details before you rate anything. You will need to enter:

The child’s full name and date of birth
The child’s age and gender
Your name and your relationship to the child (parent, grandparent, foster parent, and so on)
The date you are completing the form

These fields do real work. The clinician uses the child’s exact age to select the right comparison group when converting your responses into standardized scores, so an incorrect birthdate can distort the entire result. Your relationship to the child sets the context for the observations, since a caregiver who sees the child every evening offers a different vantage point than one who visits on weekends. Complete every field. Blanks slow scoring down.

How the Rating Scale Works

Every item describes a specific behavior, and you choose one of four frequencies: Never, Occasionally, Frequently, or Always. There is no “sometimes” option in the middle. Pick the choice that best matches the child’s typical pattern over the last month. That one-month window is deliberate, keeping the ratings tied to current behavior rather than something that happened last spring and no longer fits.²

A few practical rules make the ratings more useful:

Rate what the child does without prompting or help, not their performance when you are actively guiding them through a task.
If a behavior genuinely never comes up in your household (for instance, an item about climbing stairs when you live in a single-story home), note it in the margin or mention it to the clinician rather than guessing. Skipped items can affect scoring, so flag the situation instead of leaving a blank.
If the clinician gave you the form weeks ago and you have not started it, do not try to reconstruct a month from memory. Begin observing now, complete the form after roughly a month of paying attention, and let the clinician know about the delay. Accurate ratings turned in a few weeks late are far more useful than rushed guesses.

What Each Section Is Asking About

The form is organized into scales, each covering a different sensory system or functional area. Knowing what each section is looking for helps you recall specific moments from the past month instead of reacting to items cold.

Vision. How the child reacts to visual clutter, bright lights, or moving objects. Items may ask about difficulty finding things on a crowded shelf or squinting in ordinary lighting.
Hearing. Responses to everyday sounds such as a running dishwasher, a sibling’s voice, or background music. The form is interested in whether the child over-reacts to sounds most people tune out, or seems not to notice them at all.
Touch. Sensitivity to clothing textures, food consistency, or being touched by other people. A child who refuses certain fabrics or avoids messy play scores differently than one who actively seeks tactile input.
Taste and Smell. Reactions to flavors, cooking odors, and scented products. Extreme pickiness and gagging at mild smells both fall here.
Body Awareness. How well the child senses where their body is in space. Items ask about bumping into furniture, using too much or too little force with objects, or misjudging physical boundaries.
Balance and Motion. How the child handles activities like swinging, going down stairs, or riding a bike. This reflects the inner-ear system that keeps a person oriented.
Planning and Ideas. Whether the child can organize their body to complete multi-step tasks, such as setting a table, getting dressed in the right order, or following a sequence of instructions during a game. Clinicians call this area praxis.
Social Participation. How the child engages with family members and peers during unstructured time like shared meals, play dates, or group activities at home.

Together, the six core sensory scales from Vision through Balance and Motion also feed into a Sensory Total that the clinician calculates later.³

Rating Mistakes to Avoid

The most common error caregivers make is rating the child based on their best day rather than their typical day. If your child melts down at dinner three nights a week because the food texture bothers them, that is Frequently, not Occasionally because last Tuesday went smoothly. The clinician needs an honest picture, not an optimistic one.

Resist the urge to compare your child to siblings or classmates while you rate. The form is about your child’s individual pattern, and what looks unusual for one child may be ordinary for another. If two caregivers share parenting duties, one person should complete the form to keep the ratings consistent, though that person can talk with the other caregiver about specific observations before marking answers.

Returning the Form

Return the form through whichever channel the clinician set up. If you completed it in the WPS Online Evaluation System, your responses submit automatically and the clinician can see them right away. If you have a paper booklet, bring it to the next appointment or mail it back to the clinic. Do not fax it: the carbon-copy pages inside the booklet can produce unreadable scans. When you first receive the form, ask the clinician which return method they prefer so the completed responses do not sit in a drawer while the rest of the evaluation moves forward.

Leave the Scoring to the Clinician

Once the form is back, scoring is the clinician’s job, not yours. They add up your responses within each scale, convert the totals into standardized scores, and interpret them against age-based comparison data.³ One quirk is worth knowing about: Social Participation items are scored in the opposite direction from the sensory scales, because those items describe positive social behaviors rather than difficulties.² The clinician handles that conversion, which is why trying to tally your own totals will not give you a meaningful answer. Your role ends at accurate, honest ratings.

1
PAA. Sensory Processing Measure, Second Edition and SPM-2 Quick Tips
2
Rehabilitation Measures Database. Sensory Processing Measure
3
New Zealand Council for Educational Research. SPM-2 Sensory Processing Measure