For earthquakes there’s the Richter scale; for acidity, the pH scale; for sexuality, the Kinsey scale. It was probably only a matter of time before someone developed a Parental Overvaluation Scale, as a team of psychologists have now done. They’ve announced their creation in a new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology entitled “My Child Is God’s Gift to Humanity: Development and Validation of the Parental Overvaluation Scale (POS).”

“There was a lot of theory about parental evaluation, but there simply wasn’t a scale to measure it,” says Eddie Brummelman, a psychology postdoctorate candidate at the University of Amsterdam and the paper’s lead author. Freud, Brummelman points out, was one of the first to theorize about parental overvaluation. He saw it as a “revival and reproduction” of parents’ narcissism, a way to deflect their inflated sense of their own value and uniqueness onto their progeny.

To create the scale, the psychologists started with 85 potential questions to ask parents, then narrowed them down with input from child-development specialists and by testing them on actual parents to see how well the questions correlated with one another. They also looked at how closely the answers matched up with the agreed-upon (and fairly intuitive) definition of parental overvaluation: the extent to which a parent believes his or her child is more special than others.

The resulting seven-question test was meant to elicit a sense of parents’ feelings about their child without giving them too much of a sense of what they were being tested on. Observant parents, however, might be tipped off by questions like No. 5, which reads, “My child is more special than other children.” According to Brummelman, a few parents responded to this one by writing the words “to me” at the end of it and checking yes, which he didn’t count as an answer. (That seems like non-overvaluation—to me.) Nevertheless, most parents whom the psychologists tested fell somewhere in the middle—between 1 and 2 on the scale, which ranges from 0 to 3: “They overvalue their child a little,” says Brummelman.

Using the POS, its creators were able to test some of the theories about parental overvaluation, including Freud’s. They found that narcissistic parents indeed believed their children to be more special than non-narcissistic parents did. Parents who scored higher on the POS also believed their children’s IQ was higher than it in fact was. They were also more likely to give their children unique names.

In one study, the team tested whether parents would portray their children as more knowledgeable than they were. In the study, parents were given a questionnaire with lists of terms and asked which ones their child was familiar with. Some of the terms, however, were made-up “foils”: Along with the Gulf War, there was the “Storming of Austria.” Among the historical figures were “Queen Alberta” and “El Puente”; in world geography, the “Green Sea.” And the literature list included a book called The Princess and the Grapes. Parents who claimed their children were familiar with these made-up terms were obviously fibbing. And while a well-educated and canny “overvaluer” might be able to spot the foils and answer accordingly, according to Brummelman, plenty of parents fell into the trap, claiming that, yes, their child does know all about the “Sicilian River,” thank you very much.

One thing Brummelman et al found that did not correlate with parental overvaluation was parental warmth. Overvaluing parents may praise their children to the skies, but they’re not particularly nice to them.