[Nurses and mothers on the way ,,, from partnership to empowerment in the care!]

The area of the parental paper has been studied in several perspectives. At present, the studies carried out in Portugal have been aiming at the need of support of hospitalized children parents, at International level the investigation centers in the perception of family-nurse interactions, both in the perspective of the family and in the perspective of nurses. There is a concern about the participation of parents in the care, (in the present study we focus in the participation of mothers in the care of their children when they are hospitalized in an oncology pediatric unit, as she stays twenty four hours with her child), namely if they are or not disposed to participate. Thus our question is: If they are really disposed to participate, what do they do? What reasons make them participate? In which way are mothers integrated in the care? These were some of the questions why we decided to draw up a work about the subject Nurses and mothers on the way ... the partnership to empowerment in the care. We carried an ethnographic, exploratory and descriptive study. We observed and described, which care mothers provided to the child, the reasons that took them to participate and how they are integrated in the care. From the obtained data through the participant observation and the semi-structured interviews, twelve Cultural Domains were indentified, translating the participation of mothers in the care of the hospitalized child. From the thematic analysis of cultural domains two cultural subjects merged that constitute the central axle of the study results: the partnership and the empowerment in the Care. Based in the results, the importance of nurses stands out, they develop strategies that can help mothers to acquire competences to take care of their children, promoting the adaptation when facing situations and lifestyles, often unthinkable unexpected.