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Volume 3 Issue 2 (April - June, 2015)

Original Articles

DO PARENTS UNDERSTAND THE DENTAL FEAR IN THEIR CHILDREN? : EVALUATION USING CFSS-DS

Priyanka Thakur, Kapil Rajiv Sharma, Seema Thakur, Parul Singhal, Deepak Chauhan, Cheranjeevi Jayam, Arihant Jain

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Introduction: Dental anxiety is a very common phenomenon in children and adolescents. The Dental Subscale of the Children’s Fear Survey Schedule (CFSS-DS) is a well known instrument for assessing dental fear in children, initially presented by Cuthbert and Malamed. In most studies, the parental version of CFSS-DS is used; however, a very little information is available concerning the extent to which parents are able to report dental fear on behalf of their children. Aim: This study aims to assess whether parents are accurate reporters of their child’s dental fear. Methodology: The CFSS-DS was filled out by children (7-11 years old) and their parents on the behalf of their child. The children were asked to fill out the child version of CFSS-DS in their classrooms and the parental version was handed out to the children, together with a letter asking the mothers to fill the questionnaire on behalf of them, without any help of their children.
Result and Conclusion: By using the cut off value as 32, the mean dental score of this study was 30.66 ± 6.2245. This study showed that most of the parents are able to report the dental fear of their children with a tendency to rate it somewhat higher than their children did.
Keywords: dental fear, CFSS-DS.

 
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