Pediatric dietary assessment is challenging, particularly for young children who cannot accurately report their own intake. Many existing measures are burdensome for proxy-reporters, and briefer dietary screeners focus on specific dietary components but not total diet quality. The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate the reliability and validity of an adapted brief parent-reported diet quality screener – rapid Prime Diet Quality Score for Kids (rPDQS-Kids) – in relation to food groups and overall diet quality estimated from repeated Automated Self-Administered 24-Hour Dietary Assessment Tool (ASA24) diet recalls for young children. This was a cross-sectional study that evaluated the psychometric properties of the 16-item rPDQS-Kids. Participants of this study included parents of 1-4 year-old children participating in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (n=175) in the state of Massachusetts from January 2024 to February 2025. The rPDQS-Kids showed moderate test-retest reliability [Intraclass Correlation Coefficient for total score: 0.69 (95% CI: 0.62, 0.75)]. Consistent with a priori hypotheses, internal consistency reliability was low, with ordinal alpha=0.27 and ordinal alpha=0.34 for the healthy and unhealthy sub-scores, respectively. Further, significant correlation was observed between the rPDQS-Kids traffic light diet quality score and HEI-2020 total score among children 2-4 (n=127) years old (r=0.32) (P<0.001). Among children 1 to <2y (n=48), rPDQS-Kids was not significantly correlated with the HEI-Toddlers-2020 (P>0.05). The parent-reported rPDQS-Kids shows potential as a low-burden tool for measuring young children’s dietary quality.