Given that the psychiatric nursing standards developed by the American Nurses Association strongly advocate the inclusion of families in treatment settings, the study discussed in this article sought to determine how families were actually experiencing care in mental health settings for children and adolescents. The aim was to elicit the perspectives of parents whose children were hospitalized in psychiatric hospitals and to examine those experiences against the ideal rhetoric set forth by the standards of care. Results of in-depth interviews with a purposeful sample of parents demonstrate that there is a significant gap between standards and practice.
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