Browsing by Author "Hapuli, Emilia"

Bullying can occur among children already before school-age, and the phenomenon is well-known among day care centres' employees. There is a very limited amount of research into bullying among children before school-age, and recognizing and intervening bullying has been found difficult. Bullying is a social problem and a learned wrong behaviour. Bullying can be prevented by teaching children new ways of acting. Preventing bullying is important because it has been found to be a permanent situation: children often take over the same roles later at school. The purpose of this research was to find out and describe the different ways of preventing and intervening with bullying in Finnish cities' local plans in how to intervene with and prevent bullying. In this research I try to find tools to prevent and intervene with bullying, and how to deal with bullying situations from a daycare employee’s standpoint. Secondly this research examines how a day care employee can co-operate with parents to prevent and intervene with bullying. The material of this research consists of five plans in how to intervene and prevent bullying in Finnish cities. All of these plans are based on Kirves and Stoor-Grenner’s instruction (2011), the Plan of Preventing and Intervening with Bullying as a Part of the Early Childhood Education Plan. The material has been analyzed using theoretical content analysis. The different ways of preventing bullying in Finnish cities' local plans were creating a safe environment, teaching social and emotional skills, observation by adults and taking part in children’s games, habits and moral education and working for gender equality and the participation of children. Ways to intervene with bullying was mentioned discussion and conciliation with children. Open and honest discussion was mentioned a way to co-operate with parents. When the work to prevent bullying is done systematically as early as in kindergarten, it is possible to prevent children take the bullying roles and prevent far-reaching effects of bullying such as social exclusion.