The kindergarten and school represent the institution where most or all children enter, which means that school professionals will inevitably encounter children with different kinds of adverse childhood experiences and are in direct contact with them on a daily basis. In the theoretical introduction of this master's thesis, I present the term adverse childhood experiences, the ACE study and the consequences of adverse childhood experiences and present suggestions for helping children with adverse childhood experiences. After this, I present definitions of trauma by different authors, traumatic event and memory, retraumatization and secondary trauma. I write about the consequences of trauma, trauma informed care and resilience. In the end, I write about the importance of school in dealing with trauma and relate the topic to social work.
In the methodological part, I present the findings of a qualitative research, based on six focus groups (three focus groups were conducted in kindergarten and three in primary schools in different cities in Slovenia), with a total of 43 participants. In my research, I was primarily interested in how teachers and counselors in the kindergarten and school understand the term adverse childhood experiences, how they identify them on a daily basis at their work, which ones they see as the most common, and how they identify the consequences of adverse childhood experiences in the lives of children and adults. I was also interested in their coping strategies at work, how competent they feel to act in cases of adverse childhood experiences, and what else they would need to make it easier for them to identify these experiences and take action.
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