One of the important components of the treatment of conduct disorder in children is family work. Specifically, the family is reported to be the first point of intervention for most pre-school and school-age children. Before initiating the family work in the treatment process, certain conditions must have been established that enable the child to be in a secure environment. These conditions include accessing suitable resources to meet the basic needs of family members; having transferred to treatment and keeping under observation any parent in need of psychiatric therapy and observation; ensuring that the family home is a secure environment for each family member and any potential problems in the household have been clarified; and reaching cooperative adults to make sure that children of all ages in the household can be addressed in an appropriate and adequate manner.

Conduct disorder in children is a specific situation in that it presents problems in more than one area. Therefore, the chances of success in its treatment are reported to increase with the utilization of a multi-disciplinary approach with the involvement of relevant social resources. With the aim of ensuring these conditions, the professional working with the family acts in cooperation with institutions providing social services and social assistance. All approaches to family work aim to reveal and improve the strengths of the family. Two strategies are primarily presented in family-oriented interventions, namely the parents’ understanding of the cycle of life situations that have induced conduct disorder in the child and their training with a view to ensuring that the child can be addressed within the family and other social environments in an appropriate manner. Various studies support the effectiveness of family work and training of parents in the treatment of conduct disorder and point out that these approaches are effective in such areas as the ability of the child to develop appropriate behaviours, to establish positive peer relationships and to advance in their academic success.

The present study encompasses methods of family work, parents counselling to reveal and improve the strengths of parents, such approaches as parents training and family therapy in providing family members with consistent attitudes and behaviour management skills, and family training programs and clinical social work interventions with the inclusion of didactical instructions, interactive discussion, modelling, role-playing and feedback in parallel to psychiatric treatment and observation of conduct disorder in children.