By following some steps of phenomenological approach, we have studied the feelings, fears and anxieties experienced by a mother in the course of her child hospitalization. The child hospitalization is experienced by the mother as a moment of a intense concern and suffering, aggravated or relieved by the family's living conditions. The innumerable tasks attributed to, by society and introjected by the mother, also make her live that situation with feelings of division and ambiguity. The extreme dedication and assistance to the ill child make his/her mother temporarily careless about herself. Being impossible to deny her own needs for a long time, the mother starts living evident signs of psychic suffering concretized in insomnia, anorexia, mental discomfort and depression. The child hospitalization is verbalized by the mother as something whose effects extents to the whole family, generating alterations in its dynamics.
Hospitalized children; Mothers accompanists