Parental practices and parental support are important factors for children mental health, emotional well being (Safren et al., 2000, Aquilino & Supples, 2001, Shek, 2002, Williams & Kelly, 2005), and school achievement (Seidman et al. 2003, Cornelius-White et al. 2004, Murray & Naranjo, 2008, Bergin & Bergin, 2009). Children need for support from their parents in the struggles for gaining school success. Plunkett et al. (2008) defined academic support as a part of social support offered by significant other to go beyond academic difficulties. Previous researches (Openshaw, 1984, Spera, 2006, Murray & Naranjo, 2008) consider monitoring children school progress, making oneself acquainted with children school assignment, checking children home work, according academic support when is needed, and parental involvement in school functioning as relevant parental behaviors from this perspective.

Parent-child relations and supportive parental practices are fashioned by various environmental conditions such as parental employment and family economic stress (Brofenbrenner, 1986, Mistry et al. 2009). Within contemporary world, work issues are related with migration phenomena. Migrations bring family readjustment processes, through family dislocation, sociocultural change, and cultural conflict (Chuang & Gielen, 2009, Neto, 2009). Changes in parenting practices and parent-child relations are associated with alteration of child' social, emotional and educational functioning. A frequent type of migrations-related phenomena in Romanian contexts is parent-child separation. One or both parents leave to work abroad, and during that, children are cared for by the other parent, or by grandparents, other relatives, older brothers, neighbors, or take care of its own. Previous researches (Adam, 2002) demonstrated that the situations of instability in the family environment causes acute stress to a child and may challenge his sense of security and ability to cope with present or later life challenges and many behavioral problems – preschool and first grade behavior problems, premarital birth, and deterioration of adolescent outcomes. Parental separations during the early childhood years might be most detrimental because of a high degree of contact with and dependence on caregivers during this time period (Adam, 2002). Perceptions of unavailability of attachment figures provoke profound feeling of anxiety, anger and despair (Kobak, 1999).

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of parental separation and perceived parental support on depression and school achievement in secondary school students. The research hypotheses are (1) there are differences in perceived parental support and in depression level between children in different parental separation conditions, and (2) there is an interaction effect of duration of separation and the perceived parental support on depression and school achievement.

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