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The purpose of this article is to discuss psychosocial interventions that may be undertaken by public health nurses at the child health centres. This is an area where little research has been done so far. However, the field has begun to attract interest in recent years, and much effort has been made to integrate the principles of psychosocial work in the work with families. The question is who the families at risk might be and how the nurses can best approach them. It is shown that selecting families at risk is difficult, so the basic principle of psychosocial intervention must be to direct the psychosocial work towards all the families that attend the child health centres (primary prevention strategies). This is done to strengthen their power of resistance towards different kinds of strains and problems. When families with special risks are detected, the nurses should act on worries and not adopt a “wait and see» attitude. It is important to minimise the negative effect of the problem (secondary prevention strategies). The most commonly used methods in this work involve different kind of groups for parents, e.g. newborn-groups, sleeping-problem groups, groups for foreign mothers, groups for parents with handicapped children, etc. Psychosocial work implies a great challenge to the public health nurses, and there is yet much to be done in developing good methods.

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