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Parental separation can be a traumatic experience for the child, whatever its age. To overcome this ordeal, the child puts in place adaptive mechanisms which are either functional, enabling him to carry on his development harmoniously, or non-functional, giving rise to the appearance of symptoms covered by affective, family, relational or school registers. However the expression of this suffering will depend on several factors (the child’s age, his level of development, his personality and that of his parents, the family context, the nature of the parental misunderstanding, the place of the child within the conflict, the quality of the relationship between the parents as well as that between the child and parents after the separation…) Today there is a multiplication and interweaving of approaches to parental separation and its psychological repercussions on children, bringing a more global look to this worrying phenomenon. Here we are going to review the international literature on the subject.