Views of parents and professionals in the process od early intervention of children with special needs

In this master thesis I try to discover the perspective of parents, professional workers in health care and kindergarten on the process of early intervention of children with special needs (continuing as children with SN). In the theoretical part I present early intervention as a period without which we cannot imagine the intervention of children with SN, and it includes medical, therapeutic, psychological, social and special-pedagogical help for high-risk children and their families. The success of early intervention depends a lot on the cooperation between parents and professionals of different disciplines who have various starting points for work with children with SN, which causes differences when including children in the process of early intervention. Early intervention is not defined in Slovenia at the moment. For the purpose of this research I distributed 33 questionnaires to parents with children with SN, 30 to professional workers in health care, and 35 to professional workers in kindergartens. The results of the research have shown that there are no statistically important differences in the field of opinion, experience, imputing meaning to principles of early intervention, forms of cooperation and perceiving obstacles when cooperating with groups integrated from the side. Parents with children with SN have higher, more specific and emotionally-coloured anticipations of the process of early intervention than professional workers. The differences in views of parents, whose children attend the first age group, and parents, whose children attend the second age group in kindergarten, can be noticed in the claims for complimentary help for the family, cooperation of parents in the process of early intervention, their emotional response at the start of the process, cooperation between parents and professional workers, and perceiving cooperation between professional workers. For better cooperation, I designed guidelines for parents and professional workers based on my gathered information