The Difficult Job of Parenting: Let's Talk about Parents of Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition, neurodevelopmental disorders are a large and heterogeneous group of early onset, often lifelong conditions leading to personal, social, and/or academic functioning impairments. Although the overall prevalence of neurodevelopmental disorders has not been known with certainty so far and still needs to be studied, the general probability that a parent will give birth to a child who will present with one or more neurodevelopmental disorders appears, however, to be high, presumably above 10%. And of these children, a far from negligible proportion may present a condition of severe, chronic disability that heavily affects the quality of life of both the child and his/her family.