Stress related to nurturing children with special needs

Birth of a disabled child is always an extraordinary event in our life. A family is facing the situation without a prearranged screenplay. Not only the special needs differ from common children´s needs but also developmental conditions are completely different. Parents can feel disappointed and dependent on the assistance from others.The situation is new and unfamiliar for them and therefore they learn how to improve the approach to their child, themselves or the whole world. The theme ot this thesis is ?How parents manage to bring up the child with special needs..?It should bring authentic information about the situation of parents with a disabled child, statements about their problems and needs. It is based on the qualitative research. I collected data and information through semi-structured interviews with parents who have a child with such a special need. In the theoretical part of the thesis I tried to go from a general explanation to a detailed descriptoin of the topic. In the introductory chapters I deal with the issue of stress and burden coping. The next issue is the family, its function, families with disabled children and last but not least inappropriate educational approaches. The chapter about burden coping is an integral part of this thesis. Here I describe individual phases of accepting a disabled child and mention the topic of a social stigma as well. The fourth chapter is about the possibility how to support such affected families not only from the familly members but also from other friends. The last but one chapter describes the burnout, its symptoms and risk factors. A mother usually stays at home with this child and takes care of him. The disabled child might require full-time care which is very demanding and grueling. That is why the mother could be compromised by the burnout. In the last part I tried to specify problems of the families I interviewed. I describe a spinal muscular atrophy, an epilepsy, a mental retardation and its classification, a motor disability for example poliomyelitis. In the empirical part of the thesis I define research objectives. 1) to find out what is the biggest burden for parents with a disabled child 2) to find out how parents manage to accept this situation 3) to find out what is the biggest support for parents You can find the responses in the part ?Interpretation of research results?. The largest burden for parents with a disabled child is to accept the disability of their child. All the respondents find this period as the most distressing and demanding time in their child care. Surprisingly, the second largest burden of parents is to handle with different specialized institutions which are supposed to help them. The respondents found the biggest help and support in their families, husbands and also by communication with other similar families . According to parents there is a lack of written information about the disability and unsufficient availability of such information in Czech language