ABSTRACT
Finding ways to prevent mental health problems is perceived as an important task within child psychiatry, in concurrence with other authorities and organizations striving to promote the course of children’s development. Since the 1960s the arena of early childhood interventions has been transformed from a modest collection of pilot projects to a multidimensional domain of theory, research, practice and policy [1]. Such interventions were previously directed towards the
children themselves-specically targeting the needs of disabled children and children growing up in poverty [2]. e scope and the target group for these interventions have since then broadened and may now include mental health problems at large. As research in the eld of child development has grown, the proliferation of parent-child and family interventions have reected our increased understanding of the critical and determinative nature of parent-child interaction [2]. Early childhood intervention has thus experienced a paradigm shift from a child-oriented to a family-oriented approach [3].
