Browsing by Author "Myyry, Lotta"

Objectives. This study began with the assumption that in pedagogical documents the early childhood education staff describes more children's needs of support than their strengths. In particular, when deciding on the resources of special support, attention has been paid to the children's needs of support and the problems of development. An alternative to this problem-centered approach is positive psychology and positive education which both focus on examining strengths and well-being elements. The goal of positive education is to support well-being and learning in the day care and at school. Peterson and Seligman (2004) created the distinction of character strengths as they discovered a lack of a commonly defined vocabulary in positive psychology. This study examines whether there are more descriptions of children's strengths or descriptions of their needs of support. And whether the early childhood education staff describes the children's needs of support more specifically than their strengths. The study examines what character strengths can be found in descriptions. Methods. The data of this qualitative study consists of the pedagogical documents of 13 children and the questionnaires collected from their parents. The children were 3-5 years old. The data was analyzed by using content analysis and discourse analytic methods. Results and Conclusions. Both the parents and the early childhood education staff described the strengths of the children more than their needs of support. Total of 74 per cent of personnel expressions and 76 per cent of parents expressions were about strengths. The strengths of children with special needs were described less than children with no special needs. Out of Seligman and Peterson's 24 character strengths, there were mentioned 16. The most mentioned character strengths were kindness, curiosity and zest. There was found three ways of expressions; short-and-simple, descriptive and guiding way. There was no short and simple expressions in the descriptions of the needs of support, while 22 per cent of the strengths were described short and simple way. Descriptive way was the most common. Only 13 per cent of all expressions are written in guiding way, and it was less common in descriptions of the strengths (3%) than in descriptions of needs of support (45%).