Background A lot of children live in families where a parent is suffering from some kind of mental illness. As nurses we have to notice these children, when we meet patients with mental illnes.

Aim The overall purpose of this study was to examine if and how the district/ psychiatric nurse acknowledge the child’s situation, when a parent is suffering from mental illness.

Method A qualitative approach was chosen for this study. Six psychiatric nurses and seven district nurses were interviewed. Content analysis was used for the analysis.

Result Four main themes appeard in the result: dialogs of different character, family focus, collaboration and report duty. The dialog differed depending on the purpose and depending on working with a family perspective. Regarding collaboration with other organizations, the nurses requested and got help in order to come further in working with the patients and their children. The duty to report was sometimes a problematic matter.

The conclusion was that all nurses agreed to the importance of acknowledging the children of families with mental illness. However there was a lack of well-functioning working methods of how to help these children. One proposal for further research is to develop evidence based methods family intervention programs.