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Bakgrund: Det är få verksamheter inom vården som har de rutiner och den kunskap som krävs för att bemöta barn till föräldrar med psykisk sjukdom. Sjuksköterskornas brist på kunskap och beredskap att stödja dessa barn leder till att barnen blir osynliga och inte får den information och det stöd som de behöver. Syfte: Att beskriva barns upplevelser av att leva med förälder med psykisk sjukdom. Metod: Litteraturstudie av tio vetenskapliga artiklar med kvalitativ ansats. Resultat: Resultatet presenteras utifrån fyra huvudkategorier. Stöd och information var en av de viktigaste beståndsdelarna som barnen uttryckte. Att leva med en förälder med psykisk sjukdom påverkar barnen, de lever i oförutsägbarhet, upplever oro, rädsla, skuld och ökat ansvar för föräldern. Brist på information om förälderns sjukdom till barnen samt stöd från vården ledde till att barnens situation försvårades. Samtliga barn uttryckte en önskan om stöd från vården. Slutsats: Denna studie har visat att stöd är viktigt för barn till psykiskt sjuka föräldrar. Sjuksköterskor behöver mer kunskap och beredskap för att kunna synliggöra dessa barn och hjälpa dem till lämpliga stödinsatser. Klinisk betydelse: Genom att belysa barns upplevelser kan stöd, beredskap och utbildning för vårdpersonal utvecklas så att dessa barn får det stöd de behöver. / Background: There are few health care establishments who have the routines and the knowledge required to respond to the children with parents with mental illness. Nurses lack of knowledge and equipment to support these children leads to children becoming invisible and do not receive the information and support they need. Aim: To describe the children's experiences of living with a parent with a mental illness. Method: Literature review of ten scientific articles with an qualitative approach. Results: The results presented from the four main categories. Support and information was one of the key elements that the children expressed. Living with a parent with mental illness affects children, they live in unpredictability, experience anxiety, fear, guilt and responsibility for the parent. Lack of information about the parent's illness to the children and the support of health care led to the children's situation was complicated. All children expressed a desire for support from healthcare. Conclusion: This study has shown that aid is important for children of mentally ill parents. Nurses need more knowledge and equipment to make these invisible children visible and help them to appropriate support. Clinical significance: By illuminate children's experiences can support, equipment and education developed for caregivers so that these children receive the support they need.

The purpose of the study is to explore children’s experiences of yoga and its influence on their well-being and everyday lives. The study uses qualitative methods and thematic analysis is chosen as it provides flexibility to combine theoretical assumptions with qualitative data. Analysis is based on two focus group interviews that ask about children’s views of yoga, experience of doing yoga, feelings about yoga, any differences with other physical activities, and their experience before and after yoga. The children involved in the study appeared to experience yoga in different ways, but the majority of them agreed that yoga is a positive influence on their lives. The results of this study propose that according to children’s perspectives the practice of yoga supports physical fitness and is a calm, peaceful and relaxing activity and supports the children’s understanding of their capacity and competence and helped them to reduce unstable or negative emotions. Overall, children’s perspective of yoga shows the meaning of their view and experience both in the studio and in everyday life that will give some insights to yoga teachers and studio owners; and yoga practice might contribute to social support for children both physically and mentally.

Research taking the perspective of gifted children’s own experiences is scarce. To this researcher’s knowledge, there exists none regarding their pre-school years in the Swedish context. Therefore, this study attempts to meet this need of knowledge by presenting the voices of young gifted people’s lived experience of their pre-school years. The purpose ofthe present study is to explore the lived experiences of a few adolescents and their own conceptions and experiences of their pre-school years. Two research questions assisted my exploration of the material: What in the adolescents’ narratives appears as of significance to them? and What does it mean to experience pre-school for these gifted adolescents? Taking a phenomenologically informed approach, five semi structured interviews with informants aged 10-18 where conducted. Previous research on young gifted children has focused mainly on identification of gifted children. There are studies that put forward children’s experience of pre-school, but very few seek the experience of gifted children. Phenomenological theories also helped in analyzing the results, Ahmed’s queer phenomenology and Schütz view on the lifeworld and the social world were used. The results show that four themes were of most importance to the children; stimulation, influence, relations with peers and relations with adults, although it was also found that each individual had his/her unique experience. To some, experiencing pre-school meant for example loneliness and anxiety, while to others it meant playing with friends and positive feelings. By using the theoretical terms from Ahmed (2006) and Schütz (2002) it was found that in order to reach an oriented state, stimulation seemed necessary. Social relations with children or adults and learning activities at the correct individually adjusted level seemed to give stimulation. Influence, for example by being allowed to be different (queer), seemed to increase the possibilities to reach stimulation. When lacking both social relations and intellectual stimulation, orientation does not seem possible and sometimes causes a long-lasting disorientation or crisis. When lacking social relations some compensation from learning activities might be possible and as a consequence orientation in these moments. Implications of the study include, like previous research has found, the need of knowledge of giftedness and resources in pre-school to enable meeting the needs of all children, but mainly the contribution is that this study clarifies the great need of research in the area of gifted children’s own experiences of pre-school in order to better inform the practice.

Avhandlingens övergripande syfte var att fördjupa kunskapen om hur socialtjänsten synliggör barns fysiska och psykiska hälsa samt barns egna upplevelser i barnavårdsutredningar. Resultaten diskuteras utifrån rättsliga förutsättningar samt teorier om barn som subjekt och sociala aktörer. De fyra delstudierna visar att det finns begränsningar i hur hälsan samt barns upplevelser beskrivs om man vill förstå deras behov av stöd. En anledning till detta kan vara att den rättsliga regleringen inte per automatik ger barn status som subjekt och aktörer. Resultaten tyder på att barnperspektivet i både den rättsliga regleringen och genomförandet av barnavårdsutredningar har stärkts jämfört med vad som visats i tidigare forskning men det behövs en utvecklad analys och argumentation kring barns upplevelser och barns hälsa. En sådan förståelse ger förutsättningar för att barn blir synliggjorda utifrån sina unika förutsättningar vilket säkerställer att socialtjänsten tar hänsyn till deras unika behov. / The overall aim of this thesis is to explore how the physical- and psychological health of children – as well as children’s own experiences – are represented in child welfare investigations. The results are discussed with reference to both legal regulations and theories, which identify children as subjects and social actors in their own right. The four studies show that there are limitations in how children’s health generally, along with their experiences more specifically, are described. The consequence is a diminishing of the chances to understand the child’s need for support. One reason for this might be that legal regulations for social welfare investigations do not automatically ascribe to children the status of subjects and social actors. Compared with previous research, results gathered in this thesis indicate that the child’s perspective has been strengthened in both law and in social welfare investigations. All the same, there is still a need for more developed analyses of children’s health as well as children’s experiences. Such an understanding requires that children be seen from their unique positions, ensuring moreover that social services take into account the specific needs of individual children.

In recent years, there has been converging evidence on the relation between nature experiences and learning. Although outdoor experiences are not just seen as leisurely activities anymore, barriers, such as lack of resources or travel time can hinder the propagation of more outdoor educational programs. This study explores a relatively new outdoor educational setting that can help overcome these difficulties by decreasing the amount of resources, input and energy necessary to set up such measures: the educational forest garden. With lower maintenance in creating an environment that resembles an authentic ecosystem, the question remains if forest gardening can foster similar learning outcomes than those reported in other educational settings. A qualitative study in a Swedish mini-forest garden was employed to explore what types of learning are possible in this new type of setting. Interviews with two educators and eight children were conducted to find out what perceptions and experiences they communicate after spending time in the mini-forest garden. The educator’s ideas were compared with children’s accounts and observational notes on their behavior to see if there was a difference in perception and experience. Examples for learning were found in three different dimensions: cognitive, emotional and social. The explored categories were ecological literacy, language learning, attention; being comfortable outdoors, respect and care, awareness of surroundings, co-creation, teacher-student interaction, gender differences and free play and imagination. The findings indicate an overlap between teacher’s and children’s experiences and perceptions in almost all categories and similar beneficial learning outcomes with forest gardening to other outdoor educational endeavors. Along with the potential for self-development, forest gardening may be a new way to successfully teach in the outdoors with less input or resources. Although a small scale study that should not be generalized, the study gives insight to educators’ and children’s voices in a new outdoor educational setting and can help overcome the lack of children’s voices in research in general. At the same time, it adds to the limited amount of research on forest gardening and potentially helps to increase the popularity of forest gardening as a new outdoor educational method.

Denna kvalitativa studie syftade till att undersöka upplevelserna av att ha vuxit upp med en förälder som har bipolär sjukdom, med hjälp av intervjuer från sex deltagare. Med hjälp av Bronfenbrenners utvecklingsekologiska perspektiv har resultatet från intervjuerna analyserats tillsammans med begreppen ”risk- och skyddsfaktorer”. Det som framkom genom resultat och analys var att tiden som barn tillsammans med en förälder som har bipolär sjukdom präglades av ambivalenta känslor och instabilitet, samtidigt som det fanns trygghet i form av annan vårdnadshavare. Sällan eller aldrig fanns det stöd utöver den andra föräldern och inga insatser från samhället erbjöds dessa barn varken under tidig barndom eller tonår. Alla som deltog i studien uttryckte dock att de hade behövt fångas upp på ett eller annat sätt och att de som vuxna önskade att de fått någon typ av samtalsstöd för att kunna förstå och bearbeta sin förälders sjukdom, då detta påverkade deras barndom kraftigt. Upplevelserna var även att barndomen hade påverkat intervjupersonernas vuxenliv på olika sätt och ofta i negativ riktning. Under intervjuerna uttryckte dock intervjupersonerna att de i dagsläget befann sig på en plats i livet som kändes bra för dem, och att en del dessutom kände sig stärkta av sin barndom. / This qualitative study aimed to examine the experiences of what it is like to have grown up with a parent who has bipolar disorder, with help from interviews of six people. Together with Bronfenbrenners ecological systems theory the results have been analysed with the concept “risk- and protective factors”. What came out of the result and analysis was that being a child of a parent with bipolar disorder was featured by ambivalent emotions and instability, at the same time as there was safety in the shape of another guardian. Rarely or never were there any support beyond the other parent and no help from society was offered these children during either their childhood or youth. Everyone who participated in the study expressed that they felt the need to have been seen somehow and that as adults they wished that they had gotten some sort of counselling to be able to understand and process their parent´s disorder, since this affected their childhood vigorously. The experiences were also that the childhood had affected the participants adulthood in different ways and often in a negative direction. During the interviews though, the participants expressed that they were now in a place in life where they wanted to be and that some of them even felt strengthened by their childhood.

Syftet med studien är att ta reda på de bidragande faktorerna för etableringen av afghanska ensamkommande barn i det svenska samhället och därmed bidra till kunskapsutveckling om målgruppens behov hos yrkespersoner som kommer i kontakt med dessa barn. En kvalitativ metod har applicerats på studien. Studiens frågeställningar har besvarats med semistrukturerade intervjuer av åtta etablerade respondenter som har kommit som ensamkommande barn till Sverige. Utifrån tidigare forskning som handlar om ensamkommande barn och de tre teorierna systemteori, KASAM och Bourdieus fyra kapitalformer, har studiens material analyserats. Studien visar att myndigheternas insatser och stöd har varit uppskattade och betydelsefulla hos ensamkommande barn i deras etableringsprocess. Det framkommer att en kombination av flera yrkespersoners stöd och insatser, exempelvis av socialsekreterare, lärare, boendepersonal, vuxna volontärer, vänner, god man och kontaktperson, har spelat stor roll i ungdomarnas etablering. Studien visar därtill att några centrala faktorer såsom uppehållstillstånd, skapande av sociala nätverk, språkkunskap och yrkespersoners genuina intresse och engagemang att stötta dessa ungdomar, har varit avgörande för dessa ensamkommande barn att komma in i det svenska samhället. Det visas tydligt i studien att ungdomarnas egna ambitioner, drivkrafter, styrka, strategier, vilja och att målmedvetenhet har varit väsentliga i deras etablering. / The purpose of this study is to identify the contributing factors for the establishment of afghan unaccompanied children in Swedish society and thereby contribute to increasing knowledge among professionals who come into contact with this group. A qualitative method has been applied in the study and eight established participants who arrived as unaccompanied children to Sweden have been interviewed through semi-structured interviews. The results have been analysed based on some previous national and international researches on unaccompanied children and also on three theories: system theory, KASAM and Bourdeius' four forms of capital. The study shows that the efforts and support of the authorities have been significant and appreciated by unaccompanied minors in their establishment process. The study also declares that the participation of several professionals, for instance social workers, teachers, housing staff, volunteering adults, friends, gaurdian and contact person have played a major role in the young people’s establishment. Furthermore, the study shows that some central factors such as a residence permit, to have social networks, knowledge of the Swedish language and the extra support from the people involved have been essential for getting into the Swedish society. It is clearly shown in the study that the young peoples’ own ambitions, self motivation, struggles, own strategies, and being purposeful have been essential in their establishment.

Female-headed families have become a major component of society, globally and locally. South Africa has also witnessed an increase in the number of female-headed families. Children raised in female-headed families have been reported to be disadvantaged in several ways. Many are said to be performing poorly at school, having low self-esteem, experiencing early sexual activity, and displaying adverse behaviour. Hence, the views of adult children who grew up in female-headed families were explored to inform social work practice. A qualitative, explorative, descriptive, and contextual study was undertaken with 12 participants whose ages ranged from 25 to 35 years. The goal of this study was to gain insight into the experiences of adult children who grew up in female-headed families. Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews and analysed following Tesch’s (in Creswell, 2009) framework. Data was verified using Lincoln and Guba’s model of trustworthiness. The major findings highlighted first, a deep-seated need to understand reasons for being abandoned by their fathers. Second, the resources inherent within female-headed families, often overlooked, revealed the strengths that these families possess. Third, spirituality as the foundation of their resilience during difficult times dominated the participants’ accounts of being raised in female-headed families. Fourth, various support structures emerged as fundamental components, requisite for the optimal functioning of female-headed families. The implications for social work and recommendations for future research are presented. / Social Work / M.A. (Social Work)