Problem Worldwide, the psychopathological effects of catastrophes such as earthquake, hurricane and war are causing traumas in an enormous number of children. Identification and assessment of the impact on children of catastrophic events is essential to their healing and continued well‐being. Methods To identify the relevant tools Google Scholar, SID, PsycInfo, Medlib, MedLine, and PubMed databases were searched using the relevant Mesh terms and their equivalents including (“anxiety” or “fear” or “depression” or “psychosocial distress” or “prolonged grief” or “trauma general effect”) AND (“tool and measures”) OR (“cognition” and “parents”) AND “scale and measures”) from inception to March 2019. Findings Sixty‐four measures were identified to be applied for measuring traumas’ psychosocial effects on children. Anxiety and depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), sexual abuse, trauma general effect and stress were among the important emanated tools to the assessment of posttrauma psychosocial predicaments in children. Conclusion Few measures are identified to measure post trauma fear, prolonged grief and psychosocial distress in young children. However; a suitable scale for assessment of parents’ cognition about general effects of traumas and parents’ cognition about effects of trauma on children is less emphasized in current literature.

Background Parents’ cognition about the type and nature of consequences a disaster may pose on the children’s psychosocial health, could be a major protective factor against the long-term overwhelming complications. Given the lack of a reliable instrument to measure parents’ cognition about disasters’ effects on children’s well-being, this study was conducted to develop and validate the parents’ cognitive perception inventory of disaster effects on children’s well-being (PCP-DCWB). Methods In this cross-sectional study 300 parents of the survived primary school aged children from the Iran’s northwest earthquake on August 2012 were recruited in the city of Varzegan. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was applied to identify the subcomponents and Cronbach’s alpha and Guttmann Split-half coefficients were calculated to assess the internal consistency reliability of the scale. Results Structural indicators of the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin measure (0.69) and Bartlett’s test of Sphericity (P < 0.001, df = 153, X2 = 618.35) verified interpretability of the EFA output. Applying principal component analysis and direct oblimin rotation in the EFA four latent factors were identified (i.e., perception about child overall mental health, coping with trauma’s long-term effects, children or parents’ continuing memory of past disaster and perception about behavioral and educational problems) which explained 49.32% of the total variance. The estimated Cronbach’s alpha and split-half reliability coefficients (0.71 and 0.52 respectively) supported good internal consistency of the instrument. Conclusion The study findings revealed sound psychometric attributes of the PCP-DCWB to be applied in assessment of parents’ cognition about psychological impacts of a traumatic event on the survived children. The instrument application can shed light on level of pre-disaster preparations in local, national and international scales and help effectiveness assessment of interventions that target maintenance of psycho-social well-being among disaster-affected survivors over time.