Abstract

Growing-up consists of complex processes of growth, development and maturing. A child can`t grow- up alone; a child needs its family to feel loved, safe and accepted. Parents create a family and they are the ones that create emotional climate – the most important factor in healthy development. Parenthood is the most complex mission life can offer us. Most parents achieve that «mission» with love and success, unconditionally and constantly, «learning» parenthood lessons day by day.


Some parents fail in doing it. Emotional climate created in insufficient parenthood is not a safe environment for children and adolescents to grow-up in. In such families the climate is filled with conflicts, and developmental processes follow «wrong paths», slow down or are stopped. Clinical practice in child and adolescent psychiatry demonstrates a spectrum of psychological/ mental difficulties in children that grew up in such families.


Some disfunctional parents can learn to be better parents, often with help of experts in the field. Some parents accept «parenthood lessons» with difficulties.


In such situations, institutional interventions, that have to evaluate parental competencies and decide on alternative models of care, are complex and demanding tasks that seek high level of expertness in all members included in the process. Isolating a child from its primary family is not an easy decision. It is even harder to yield that decision in the right moment and not harm developmental processes in child/adolescent that are already «undermined».