Samenvatting

Many people face the challenge of combining (severe) mental illness (SMI) with parental tasks. From the perspective of personal recovery it is important to understand more about the meaning of the strategies parents can develop to deal with the challenges and vulnerabilities that a mental illness may convey.
To make the possibilities of parents with mental health problems comprehensible and to discover the relationship between several concepts a model is conceptualized of Needs, Barriers, Motivation, Strategies and Goals towards parenting with success and satisfaction.
Method
Items are described from a recent doctoral thesis (Van der Ende, 2016). This information is complemented with findings from other studies.
Results
The model starts with parental needs. Next are barriers that are in the way of reaching good parental goals. Motivated by stimuli from their families and/or developed strategies the parental role can be executed with success and satisfaction.
Conclusion
Support by the informal network or professionals is needed in a lot of cases.
To support a satisfying and successful parental role, by professionals, an intervention is developed and evaluated. This intervention, has the potential to function as a useful tool for supporting parents.