At the realization that the child has special needs, the family dynamics changes significantly. The parents or guardians of children are often worried and experience feelings of guilt and powerlessness, which grow due to the child’s poor learning performance. Despite additional professional assistance, provided to the child in school, parents turn to external experts and seek help in the form of learning instructions, psychological and psychotherapeutical consultations, speech therapy treatments, sensory integration and different complementary and other approaches. Due to stress and distress, some parents also look for psychosocial support for themselves. Therefore, various experts enter the life of children and parents. In professional literature, we can find suggestions for cooperation between all the involved parties, which has great benefits for the child. This way, professional workers gain important information, which makes it easier for them to plan and provide assistance to individual children, and parents are informed about the child’s progress and development in the learning, social and emotional field. Such an approach can significantly relieve the parents. We wanted to know, to what extent the parents of children with special needs with additional professional assistance find it necessary to seek extracurricular forms of assistance for the child and what is the role of the school in this manner. We wanted to find out, why parents seek help for their child also outside the school and establish statistically significant correlations between the variables. We also wanted to know, to what extent parents seek psychosocial support for themselves. With the help of an anonymous survey questionnaire, we performed a quantitative research, in which we included 236 parents of children, included in the adapted educational programme with additional professional assistance. We found that parents are satisfied with the cooperation with school professionals as well as with the effectiveness of the additional professional support in the school. Despite this, almost a third of children are receiving extracurricular learning support, a quarter of children psychological and psychotherapeutical support and a minor part of parents also choses additional forms of support. We found statistically important correlations between the type of extracurricular assistance and different special needs. Parents state different reasons for their decision for extracurricular treatments, where the desire for additional support for the child in addition to the existing one in the school stands out. More than half of the parents report about good cooperation between parents, professional workers of the school and performers of extracurricular support. In terms of extracurricular treatments, parents report about some obstacles, they particularly point out excessive prices, too long waiting times and poor access to treatments. The constant and daily care for the child’s success and development can also stress out the parents. It is not negligible that 17% of parents seeks psychosocial support for themselves. The results of the research will contribute to the understanding of distress of families and provide professional school workers with the possibility to establish a better dialogue with parents.
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