The Parental Authority Questionnaire-Short (PAQ-S; Alkharusi, H., Aldhafri, S., Kazem, A., Alzubiadi, A., & Al-Bahrani, M. (2011). Development and validation of a short version of the parental authority questionnaire. Social Behavior and Personality, 39, 1193-1208.) is a short measure of authoritative, authoritarian and permissive parenting styles, but has not been validated in non-Arabic samples. The current study assessed the PAQ-S in Australian and Polish samples. The results indicated that the PAQ-S provided poor fitting models in both samples and a lack of measurement invariance. Further analyses identified subsets of 11 items for maternal and paternal parenting styles with each providing improved model fit. Reliability for the remaining permissive items however was poor. Future research may thus aim to further revise the measurement of authoritative, authoritarian and permissive parenting.