Early childhood is a time of very intensive development, and parents play a key role in creating conditions for a child's growth and development. Parental behavior refers to parental guidance and support for the child's development, as well as to the procedures and activities that the parent carries out deliberately in order to care for and protect the child. Parental stress is a disturbing feeling towards oneself or the child/children whose source lies in the demands arising from the parental role. The aim of the study was to compare the experts´ and parental perception of parental behavior and parental stress regarding parents of children in early childhood with a typical and risky developmental pattern and to gain insight into the experience of parents and experts about each other. The research involved 251 parents of preschool children with a typical or risky developmental pattern and 105 professional associates - employees of preschool institutions of the City of Zagreb, pedagogues, psychologists, speech therapists and educational rehabilitators. In addition to sociodemographic questionnaires, the survey used the Parental Behavior Questionnaire, the Parental Stress Source and Intensity Questionnaire and the Incomplete Sentence Test. The results show that experts perceive parental support lower than parents do and attribute to them a greater degree of restrictive control and indulgence than parents do. In terms of parental stress, it has been shown that experts perceive and attribute to parents a higher level of parental stress than parents do. Examining the perception of experts and parents about each other, experts more often stated a negative than a positive experience of the parents they work with, which is contrary to the findings obtained for parents and their experience of experts. By comparing the two subsamples of parents, it was obtained that in terms of parental behavior, parents of children with a typical developmental pattern show more parental support and more restrictive control than parents of children with a risky developmental pattern, with both subsamples showing equal indulgence. At the level of overall stress, no significant differences were found between both parental subsamples, in the experience of experts, where the distributions of positive, negative and neutral experiences are equal. Experts in preschool institutions can be an important source of social and professional support to parents of children with a typical and risky developmental pattern, and they are obliged to continuously strengthen their professional and communication competencies in order to make this support as high quality as possible.