The parent Vanderbilt form

The parent Vanderbilt form asks a caregiver how often specific attention, hyperactivity and impulsivity behaviours show up at home, plus how the child is functioning day to day. It records observations for a clinician to interpret. It does not produce a diagnosis, and it is not a test the child takes.

Quick facts

Age range: The 2002 NICHQ document does not state a numeric age range. It instructs raters to judge each behaviour against what is appropriate for the child's age, and the teacher form asks for a grade level, so it is used with school-age children.
Who completes it: A parent or caregiver, and a teacher who sees the child across the school day.
Domains measured: Inattention, Hyperactivity and impulsivity, Co-occurring behaviour items, Performance and functioning items
Form types: Parent / caregiver form, Teacher form
Questions: Parent initial form: 55 items. Teacher initial form: 43 items. The follow-up scales carry the first 18 core symptom questions plus the performance questions.
Completion time: Pending primary-source verification
Source organization: National Institute for Children's Health Quality (NICHQ)

Why the parent view matters

Home is where mornings, homework, transitions and sleep happen. Those are the moments a clinician cannot observe in a fifteen-minute visit, and they are often the moments that matter most to the family.

Recording them on a structured form turns memory into something comparable over time.

What a parent score can and cannot indicate

It can show which behaviours a caregiver sees often, and whether they are affecting daily functioning.

It cannot confirm or rule out ADHD, and it cannot explain why a behaviour is happening. Only a qualified clinician can interpret that, using history and information from more than one setting.

What happens next

Your responses become part of one shared picture alongside the teacher view, so the next appointment starts with a trend instead of a recollection.

Instrument items and rights

This page describes the instrument and links to the official source. We do not reproduce the questionnaire on this site.

NICHQ makes the 2002 first edition available for free download and requests citation when it is referenced. That is not a grant of digital or commercial reproduction rights, and later-edition AAP material must not be reproduced without rights. Public pages describe and cite only.

In-product permission status: not established.

Primary sources

1. NICHQ Vanderbilt Assessment Scales (first edition, 2002) (opens in a new tab), National Institute for Children's Health Quality (NICHQ) (2002)
2. AAP ADHD toolkit / later-edition Vanderbilt materials, American Academy of Pediatrics

Author: Threaded Care editorial team

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