Fear of dental treatment sometimes already begins during childhood. Different kinds of diagnostic instruments can measure children’s dental anxiety. In this study the reliability and convergent validity of 7 instruments are compared. Results show that there is no ‘gold standard’ with which convergent validity can be established unambiguously. Furthermore, self report measures are investigated more often than observational measures even though the latter are more commonly used. Generally, the compared measures are satisfactory in respect to their reliability. Nevertheless, sufficient interest coherence is sometimes lacking. This could be explained by the multidimensional character of the construct ‘fear’ and, in some cases, the type of measuringmethod. In almost none of the compared studies were norms defined prior to the study by means of which statistical indicators could be unambiguously interpreted. In the present study, such norms were established.