Child neglect has been identified, accurately, as a major public health problem with serious long-term consequences for the health and well-being of America’s children. With this, refining the measures of child neglect is critical in child maltreatment research. The clearer and more consistent the definitions of neglect, the greater and more improved the understanding. This examination consists of three objectives: (1) to highlight persistent measurement issues in child neglect research; (2) to introduce a framework currently being used to guide the construction of new measures of child neglect in a longitudinal survey of caregivers; and (3) to encourage more research in the area of child neglect measurement. Where greater knowledge can be learned about the optimal measurement strategies for assessing neglect risk, future studies with large-scale general populations should incorporate items that can be used to construct better estimates of the incidence and prevalence of neglect risk. The result of this discussion is to encourage the development of new child neglect measures for survey research with both high-risk and general populations. References