Child Feeding Questionnaire (CFQ)

The Child Feeding Questionnaire (CFQ) does not ask what a child eats. It asks how a parent thinks and behaves around feeding them — who decides portion sizes, whether the parent limits certain foods, whether they push the child to finish, and how worried they are about the child's weight.

Thirty-one items on a 5-point scale sort into seven factors. Four cover perceptions and concerns: perceived responsibility for feeding, perceived parent weight, perceived child weight, and concern about child weight. Three cover practices: restriction, pressure to eat, and monitoring. The underlying research question is whether heavy control over feeding interferes with a child learning to read their own hunger and fullness cues. It is for parents of children roughly ages 2 to 11.

• Mapping the gaps: A scoping review of research on pediatric feeding disorder - ScienceDirect

Licensing Notes: Developed by Birch and colleagues and published in Appetite (2001). The full instrument appears in the published article, and the American Psychological Association hosts a copy in its obesity guideline resources.

Learn More: Norms differ substantially by country — average restriction scores in Sweden run well below those reported in the US, Australia, and Japan — so comparing a score against a published mean requires checking which population that mean came from.