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Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL)
1 year 6 months to 18 years
The Child Behavior Checklist is a parent-report questionnaire covering emotional and behavioural functioning in children aged 1 year 6 months to 18 years. It forms part of the ASEBA family of measures, alongside the Teacher Report Form and the Youth Self-Report. It is also searched for as the CBCL assessment and the Achenbach checklist.
It is one of the most widely used and most heavily researched behavioural measures in child psychology, and it is often the first standardised instrument administered in an assessment because of how much ground it covers.
What does the CBCL cover?
Beyond a total problems score, the CBCL reports two broad groupings and a set of narrower syndrome scales.
- Internalising. Anxious and depressed presentation, withdrawn presentation, and somatic complaints.
- Externalising. Rule-breaking behaviour and aggressive behaviour.
- Other syndrome scales. Social problems, thought problems and attention problems.
- DSM-oriented scales. Groupings aligned to diagnostic categories including depressive, anxiety, somatic, ADHD, oppositional defiant and conduct problems.
It also includes competence scales covering activities, social functioning and school, which are easy to overlook and often the more useful half of the profile.
Why use parent, teacher and youth forms together?
Because agreement between informants in child mental health is typically modest, and that is a finding rather than a flaw. Children behave differently across settings, and adults notice different things.
A child whose teacher reports significant attention problems while their parent reports none is presenting a pattern worth explaining. So is the reverse. Where the young person's own self-report diverges from both, that too is information, particularly for internalising difficulties that adults frequently underestimate.
What can the CBCL not do?
It does not diagnose. Elevated scores on a DSM-oriented scale indicate that the reported profile resembles that diagnostic grouping, not that the criteria are met.
It is also a broad screen rather than a precise instrument. Its value is in showing where to look more closely, and in providing a standardised baseline that can be repeated later to measure change.
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This page is general information about an assessment instrument and is not clinical advice. Whether a particular assessment is appropriate depends on the individual and the question being asked.