Browsing by Subject "itsetunnon tukeminen"

Goals. The purpose of this research was to find out views on a child’s self-esteem and ways of supporting it, from graduating kindergarten teachers from the university of Helsinki. The views on a child’s self-esteem, the studies done on it and the significance of early childhood education training formed the research problems. As a future early childhood educator, I found the topic to be worthy of studying because of its importance in a child’s life. The strengthening of a child’s self-esteem and positive self-image is one of the most important missions of early childhood education. A strong self-esteem has been linked to for example satisfaction with life, selfappreciation and self-confidence. The experiences in childhood and adolescence create the base for self-esteem, therefore kindergarten teachers and other early childhood educators have great responsibility and a big task upon them. Methodology. The research was carried out by using a qualitative research method. The material was gathered with a questionnaire. 19 students of early childhood education from the university of Helsinki participated in the research. The material was analyzed by using qualitative material analysis. Results and conclusions. According to this research, kindergarten teachers graduating from the university of Helsinki believe that the self-esteem of a child and supporting it is a very important matter. The respondents mostly comprehended self-esteem as self-appreciation. Many answers highlighted encouragement and praise as ways of supporting positive self-esteem. The experience of succeeding, the supporting of positive relationships with peers and individual attention were also seen as important ways of supporting self-esteem. The respondents were divided by their thoughts about if their education and training provided by the university of Helsinki was broad enough for the respondents to support children’s self-esteem sufficiently.