A personality disorder is a sustainable pattern of perception, cognition and relationship with the environment and one's person, pervasive, maladaptive and inflexible, affecting important areas of the individual's life functioning. Specialized studies in the field describe a high rate of heritability of the personality disorders and the importance of these parent personality disorders in the development of the child, including the development of psychopathology.

The purpose of this study was to assess the frequency and type of personality disorder in parents of children with psychiatric pathology and to identify a relationship between personality disorders in parents and internalizing/externalizing problems in children.

The study was conducted on two groups of 30 children and their parents, the first batch of children with internalizing problems and the second with children with externalizing problems, hospitalized in the Pediatric Psychiatry Clinic from Cluj-Napoca during April-September 2011. We used as instruments for assessment the psychiatric interview, SCID-II and CBCL. Data processing was done with SPSS version 17.

We revealed a relationship between the avoidant, obsessive-compulsive, schizoid and depressive personality traits of the parents and psychiatric disorders in children.

Personality disorders are relatively common among parents of children with psychiatric diagnosis. For these reasons therapeutic relationship and plan for children should be made by taking into account the presence of the personality disorder of the parent.