Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine how child carers develop their roles through training as an additional contact person for children of parents suffering from mental disorders. Furthermore, the study aims to examine how these contact persons can support children and their parents at an early stage in the children's lives. The study questions how child carers describe their own development in relation to the ongoing training programme in which they are participating, and how they describe the evolution of their work and impact of this development on the children.
Result
The study shows that the theories presented in the further education programme were relatively unknown to the child carers. They benefited greatly from the combination of self-study (which was not part of the design), lectures and study groups. The child carers summarise their learning and development process in six themes: the desire to do good, the development of 'to think' to 'to understand', interactive learning, the need to see the child's perspective, pedagogical implications and self-reflection. Throughout the programme the child carers developed close relationships with the children.
Design
Four child carers participated in the study. These child carers attended a further education programme over three years while they worked as regular child carers at a Swedish daycare centre. All four child carers were attached to one child each with a mother or father with a mental illness. The further education programme included association theory, Stern's theory of the self-development of children and affect theory. The child carers received guidance from a child psychologist every other week, participated in study groups together and attended a lecture on mental illness. Data collection consists of conversations between child carers and the researcher as well as the child carers' logbooks. In total, the researcher had five interviews with each child carer over three years. The material has been analysed according to Polkinghorne's descriptions of narrative analysis.
References
Hagström, B. (2010). Kompletterande anknytningsperson på förskola. Malmø: Malmö Studies in Educational Sciences No. 48, Malmö högskola.
Financed by
not disclosed