In this contribution some of the results of empirical research on children of mentally disturbed parents are summerized. Severe and especially chronic parental psychopathology correlates with an increase of developmental disorders and psychiatric deviances in children. Some of the children show considerable impairment in their cognitive development as well as problems in the development of social skills. Their behavior is either characterised by with-drawal and apathy or dominated by anti-social and delinquent traids.

The high psychiatric morbidity among these children can be viewed as the result of interaction between certain risk-factors, which determine the childs vulnerability for mental disorders. Some of these variables appear to be directly related to parental psychopathology. There is evidence, that growing up with a severly disturbed parent, especially when this leads to chronic disturbance of parent-child relationships and disruption of family life, increase the psychiatric risk of the children.