The findings presented in this volume suggest that, where professionals engage in effective intervention procedures (recognising children's caring roles, acknowledging needs, making appropriate assessments and referrals), these can be crucial in preventing crises and allowing children (and parents) some degree of choice in undertaking informal care responsibilities. Furthermore, when professionals offer sensitive and non-demeaning assistance, this help is also highly valued by families. However, in most cases it seems that professionals fail to engage in these effective intervention procedures and to offer needs-led assistance. A notable exception to this, however, is the service and support provided by the many young carers projects. Our evidence suggests that these projects are more likely than statutory services to offer support to families when children are caring for parents with mental illness.

However, while young carers projects play a vital role in families where parents are affected by mental illness, in practice it seems that project workers and many statutory workers experience difficulties in implementing effective assessment and intervention procedures for young carers. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, there is a lack of available and consistent assessment tools, or ‘local procedures’ and guidance (see Dearden and Becker, 2000b). Secondly, we cannot discount the fact that the academic debate, which emerged in the mid 1990s and which considered whether or not children who care represented a valid welfare category, challenged fundamentally the direction of policy and practice developments. A disability rights perspective on young caring suggested that describing children as young carers was both unhelpful and unnecessary. Some disability authors promoted prevention as a key intervention strategy; that is, children would not have to provide ‘care’ if disabled parents were adequately supported practically and in their parenting roles (Keith and Morris, 1995; Morris, 1995; Parker and Olsen, 1995; Olsen, 1996). This debate has been muted to a large extent by the recognition in research and policy that children continue to provide informal care (and thus require strategic intervention), and often regardless of the nature and level of support offered to their mentally ill or disabled parents. Indeed, the evidence presented in this volume shows categorically that, despite the fact that all 40 parents in our sample were receiving services, and sometimes from multidisciplinary teams, parents still had to rely on their children for care.