The authors of this paper have been working with refugee families in Sweden for many years. The team for Children and families (“Barn- och familjeteamet”) at the Medical Refugee Centre started 1992. Since that and till today the team has been developing a working form that emphasise resilience and healthy resources in the families, a salutogenetic way of thinking.

In this paper we have the focus on the difficult time the asylum seeker families goes through when waiting for the decision from the migration authorities. We describe how we have been thinking about this problematic period and how we try to work with the families in order to keep them as healthy and competent as they were when they came to Sweden. The waiting time affects the family disturbing in many cases the whole system and lead sometimes to unhealthy ways of coping.

Our work when we meet the families has the following goals:

- To strengthen the parents in their efforts to continue being the strong and capable parents they have been before they came to Sweden and before “asylum waiting time”.

Do not allow that they give up their parent roles and the responsibility for the childrens' health and well being.

- To strengthen the children's own healthy resources giving possibility for their thoughts and wishes to have a place in the discussion.

- To help them to see alternatives to Sweden, discuss the possibility of return to homeland. In this discussion contribute to wide the perspective and take in account another aspects that maybe can change the experience of return as impossible

- To stay against the forces that, trying to “help” the asylum seeker child/family show them strategies that instead of strengthen resilience emphasise unhealthy reactions and distortions in family structure and function