Studies have found that up to 80 percent of the primary school children aged 8 to 12 years report to worry every now and then, mostly about school, health, dying and illness, and social issues. Six to seven percent of the children met the diagnostic criteria of either overanxious disorder or generalized anxiety disorder. A promising scale for measuring childhood worry seems to be the PSWQ-C. This is a 14-item age-downward adaptation of the PSWQ, which was developed as an instrument that can be used to assess process characteristics of abnormal worry (uncontrollability) rather than the content or frequency or worry. A study of 486 children from regular primary schools in the Netherlands was conducted. The psychometric properties of the PSWQ-C were examined in this group of 8- to 12-year-old children. Participants completed questionnaires in their classrooms. Results indicated that the PSWQ-C was found to be reliable in terms of internal consistency and correlated meaningful with a scale measuring anxiety disorders symptoms. Reliability and validity analyses clearly showed that three reverse scored PSWQ-C items were unsatisfactory and that it was preferable to discard these items when using the scale in children of this particular age group. The PSWQ-C seems to be a useful tool for differentiating between normal and pathological worry in children of this age, although it is recommended to use the shortened scale. 3 tables, 23 references