Background: The new Swedish patient law advocates patient's participation in public healthcare. Swedish surveys indicate that patients in child and adolescent mental health care experience lack of opportunities to participate and to be involved in decision-making about their care. This might indicate shortcomings in nursing care in that regard. Person-centred care manifests lifeworld perspective and patient participation and is one of the core competences in nursing.

Aim: To explore nurses experiences of children and adolescent's participation in psychiatric care.

Method: An interview based descriptive qualitative study with qualitative content analysis.

Results: Nurses experience that children and adolescents´ participation in their care is crucial for caring results. Nurses had experiences of using a variety of nursing interventions to motivate and facilitate involvement of children and adolescents in their care although it could often be a difficult task. Three main categories and seven subcategories emerged from the result.

Conclusion: Participation by children and youth in their care had several positive outcomes in terms of caring results and would often demand nursing interventions on many levels and a variety of methods to achieve. The use of person-centred nursing interventions was beneficial to achieve participation of children and youth.