The process of parents coping with birth of a child with severe disability

A child begins to create first relationships within its family, especially if it is a nuclear family. These relationships tend to deepen over time. The child forms relationships towards its parents or siblings. Even sibling relationships are extremely important in shaping the child's personality and its further development. If the child is born with a severe disability, it poses a great burden and responsibility to the parents. It causes a lot of worries because the family needs to deal with the birth of such a severely disabled child and try to accept it in the family. This thesis is divided into two parts theoretical and practical. The first chapter of the theoretical part focuses on a family, functions of a family and on families that take care of disabled children. The second chapter describes individual types of severe disabilities. The third chapter deals with the ways a family reacts when a severely disabled child is born. This chapter therefore discusses individual stages of coping. The practical part was carried out using a qualitative research method. The research took place in the Příbram District. Information and data was obtained by a semi-structured interview with the children's parents. Since it is not necessary to have a lot of respondents when conducting a qualitative research, I believe that even a small number of respondents I worked with during my research is sufficient and appropriately complements my thesis. The main aim of the thesis was to determine in what way the parents coped when a severely disabled child was born. For the purposes of the interview, I formulated individual questions that were vital for the main research question and objective of the thesis. The research results confirm that not every parent can entirely cope with the fact that he or she has a severely disabled child. This is shown by the results of the individual interviews and also by the conducted research. Among other things, the research also proved that most parents have not been or still are not sufficiently informed about the reason why their child was born disabled. This thesis could be beneficial for parents whose child was born severely disabled. Such parents would be able to learn about families that suffer the same (or even worse) fate. The thesis could help them to share their feelings and find strength as well as hope for the future