Orphan Care

Importance of Family

The Bible, life experience, and research all agree that children grow best in families. God created family as told in the first chapters of Genesis and like other things in creation, family represents God’s good intentions for the world. In Psalm 68:6, we read “God sets the lonely in families,” recognizing God’s intention is for families to be the source of belonging. Studies over many years in a wide range of cultures and contexts have consistently demonstrated the positive impact families have on children’s growth and development.

Families are the most important source of love, attention, emotional support, material sustenance, and moral guidance in a child’s life. Children who are cared for by safe and loving families are more likely to thrive than those reared in orphanages. Children growing up in families generally receive the kind of love, attention, and care essential to their wellbeing. The daily life and close relationships within a family lay the foundation for a child’s social and emotional development, self-image, and sense of belonging. As children interact with members of their households and the wider community, they absorb the patterns and values of their culture and develop the language, customs, and skills they will need in their adult lives.

Simply put, children grow best in families.

Limitations of orphanages

Orphanages have historically been seen as a solution for orphaned and vulnerable children, but research shows that residential care often fails to meet their needs.

Long-term stays in orphanages can negatively impact a child’s physical, intellectual, and emotional development. Even the best orphanages struggle to provide the emotional and social support children need, resulting in difficulties forming healthy relationships.

Orphanages and children’s homes separate children from the family and community that are essential for developing healthy social relationships. Children leaving residential care are frequently unprepared for independent life.

While smaller residential facilities may serve as a temporary response for some children, they should never be viewed as a long-term solution.

Simply put, children grow best in families.

Shift to family care

Around the world, there is a growing movement to replace orphanages with family-based care. The shift from residential care to family care and the end of the orphanage era is a reality today even in Albania. All this change requires a concerted effort and focus on increasing family-based care options for children. Everyone’s efforts must shift from supporting children in orphanages and children’s homes to supporting children in families. Championing family-based care includes supporting efforts to strengthen families, increase alternative family care options, and empower communities.

Prevention or Strengthening families

Strengthening the capacity of families to provide and care for children is the best way to prevent separation of children from their families, to reduce placement in orphanages, and to ensure successful reunification of children from orphanages back into their families or placement into alternative family care.

It is critical to help families gain support and access to necessary services to meet the material, educational, and emotional needs of their children.

Given the possible range of a family’s needs and circumstances, there is no “one size fits all” solution. Generally, strengthening families is about building their resilience and addressing their unique challenges. Family strengthening, or what is sometimes called family preservation, includes things like: livelihood support, material support, cash payments, food and agricultural support, access to education and health care, daycare, after-school programs, mentoring, special education services, counseling, parent education, support groups, resource centers, youth centers, temporary family shelters, and spiritual support.

These solutions help ensure families can properly care for their children, while also decreasing risk of mistreatment, neglect, or abuse.

Intervention or Increasing family care options

When children are separated from their parents due to death, abuse, or other causes, priority should be placed on ensuring they are cared for within families. Because every child’s needs and circumstances are unique, this requires a “continuum of care” offering a range of family-based options that are carefully matched to each child’s best interests.

Building up support for kinship care, foster care, and adoption offers those children the opportunity to find alternative care.

Kinship care

Kinship care includes care by aunts, uncles, grandparents, older siblings, and other extended family members. The majority of children living outside parental care live with their relatives and extended family members. It is the most prevalent and most indigenous model of alternative care throughout the world.

Foster Care

Foster care is the full-time care of a child within a non-related family, who has been selected, qualified, and approved. Foster care providers agree to meet the developmental, psychosocial, medical, educational, and spiritual needs of a child who is not able to live with his or her own parents or extended family.

Adoption

Adoption is the permanent legal transfer of parental rights and responsibilities for a child. In efforts to ensure a permanent placement for a child, adoption is a vital option in situations in which it is absolutely clear that a child can never again be cared for by his or her birth family.