Parents of Psychiatrically Hospitalized Children: A Decade of Changing Perceptions

When a child is hospitalized on a psychiatric unit, the parents are crucial to the evaluation and treatment of that child. While the importance of parents to their child's inpatient treatment may seem obvious, it is a topic which has been surprisingly rare in recent literature, and certainly warrants further empirical study (Blotcky et al., 1984). During the last decade, I have been a social worker whose roles have included child therapist, parent and family therapist, and research co-investigator at a children's psychiatric hospital affiliated with a large midwestern university. I have found that the view of these children's parents, in the eyes of hospital staff, has been a slowly evolving one. A review of the evolution of these perceptions may have significance both for clinical implications and for potential