Browsing by Author "Manninen, Hanna-Mari"

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the experiences of parents with highly sensitive children's schooling and support need. The first research question was to find out in what way parents experience highly sensitivity to be present in the child's school running. Second question of research was how the dialogue and understanding between parents and the school has gone. The third question of research was what kind of support highly sensitive children should receive and the fourth research question was what kind of information should be given to schools on the basis of parental reportedly. The study is empirical, which explores the experiences of the parents of highly sensitive children. They were approached from the Facebook Highly Sensitive group and the dossier was collected from them by email. The survey was answered in the form of a questionnaire and a free-form writing. The purpose of the study was to highlight the experiences and aspirations of parents, how should children's individual differences be reflected in the school's everyday life. After collecting the material, I used method of thematic analysis of research. I highlighted the points of interest in research, encode and theme material through different themes and similarities and differences. As an auxiliary tool for describing the analysis, I used the Matrix table. The results showed that parents were longed for schools to increase their general knowledge about highly sensitivity and related sensory processing sensitivity. Half of respondents hoped for more understanding of schools to see individual differences between their highly sensitive children. In conclusion, it seemed that for example, schools would benefit from leaflets, which describe the main issues of highly sensitivity. Also, increasing emotional education in schools would probably be beneficial. In addition, operating therapy was significant help, especially in sensory processing sensitivity. This supports the idea of schools to increase co-operation with therapy, bringing valuable operational expertise to the the aim of strengthening learning and active participation of children and young people in the everyday life of schoolwork.