Parents and children can choose each other

Today Ukraine has more than 100,000 orphan children. Most of them are raised in orphanages or boarding schools, some in family foster homes, and a few are adopted. However, far from all those willing to accept somebody else’s child into their family can afford it, some of them because of financial problems and others for fear that things might go wrong.

The institution of foster care was adopted long ago in the developed countries. For example, 65% children requiring care by the state in Great Britain and 40% in the Netherlands live in foster families. Ukraine at present has thirty-eight such families (four in Kyiv) bringing up forty-one children. Foster parents who get money from the state for maintenance can abandon their role at any moment and return the child to the organs of social guardianship. The child also can renounce his parents and find new ones. In addition, foster families make no secret of children’s past. Psychologists claim that this helps to avoid conflicts, for it is not an easy task to deal with children who never known a mother’s care. Foster father Borys Sokolov told The Day, “Children in orphanages always have their clothes in tatters. They’ve got used to store food and don’t consider theft as anything wrong. They share everything and have no personal belongings. When we gave our foster daughter a makeup set as a birthday present, Svitlanka kept it untouched in her room for almost a year.”

Work on the Transformation of State System of Child Care Institutes program began three years ago in Ukraine. At that time foster families were seen only as a hypothetical possibility, and now we speak of it as a reality. “Developing this reality depends on social policy,” psychologist Halyna Bevz says. “Our research has demonstrated that a desire to help a child is natural for any community. Many children were living in stepfamilies even before our program started its work. If the social policy is favorable, the number of people ready to take an orphan into their family will rise significantly.”

The main goal for foster care is to introduce the child into society so that he could function as its competent member instead of joining the ranks of the asocial. Foster children stay with the family until they reach 18 and cannot claim parents’ real estate or assets. Unfortunately, the law provides no further support for such children.

A foster family encounters much more stress than a regular one. This is why psychological, legal, and social support, primarily from the state, is so important for it. This will increase the chances for orphans to find love and warmth in their new homes.

Every foster family has a history of its own. One of them took infant twin foundlings from a hospital, who could not even walk at that time. Another adopted a child from an orphanage. And Kateryna Yepisheva got her foster daughter in a bargain for the half of a house she purchased: her neighbor had deserted her own daughter. At first Kateryna just felt pity for a poor child; then she heard from Olya’s mother that she relied upon getting alimony for her deserted child and started to seek any possible means to protect the girl’s rights. The biological mother was denied parental rights, and the new family got foster status. Or consider another life story: Svitlana’s mother died when she was three. The girl was handed from one relative to another until finally she stayed with her ninety- year-old grandfather. The Sokolov family (Kyiv) got wind of this story by chance and, without even seeing the girl, immediately decided to take her. “Svitlanka was afraid to speak to us first, even to go eat with us,” says Sokolovs’ elder son, 13-years-old Oleh. “But she had nobody but us. Let people take such children into their families, and let God help them.”

To become foster parents, one does not have to be trained. All you need is a desire to share the warmth of your heart with children treated poorly by fate, to have at least one child of your own, e.g. personal experience in family raising, and to call the Center for Childhood Research at the Ukrainian Institute for Social Research (044) 239-3916. Kyivans can turn to the capital’s foster families center at 248-5191. The experts will examine your abilities for this noble mission, and a special center will provide you with the training needed for your new role.

COMMENTARY

Volodymyr NIKITIN, Ph.D. in culture studies and educational consultant to the International Center for Public Policy Research:

In the first Soviet years Ukraine implemented a state system for child rearing, popularizing the renunciation of personal life. Being an architect, I know about the so-called communal housing projects in Moscow where even bedrooms were common. It was a powerful movement aimed at the destruction the idea of family itself, of family raising. It was considered that family reproduces patriarchal traits and modern man should not be brought up in it. In the thirties things settled down a little, but the idea that people should have unified school education took root in people’s minds. The homeless children problem also required solving, and huge orphanages came into existence, making Makarenko with his pedagogical methods a national hero. At that time the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) patronized orphanages.

Today we should move on (or perhaps return) to an absolutely different way of thinking. Owing to the disappearance of the young pioneers organization the education sphere remains idle. We have to deal with it through the family, in contrast to huge prison-like orphanages. Incidentally, when in the 1970s the United States encountered youth problems connected with the destruction of basic values, Hollywood started to produce numerous films on family values, setting in motion a tremendous propaganda machine. I believe the family educator to be one of the central figures in forming a full-scale independent society. We should teach this; we should encourage this; we should introduce this as a special social position.

Kateryna IVANOVA, researcher at the Center for Childhood Research at the Ukrainian Institute of Social Research:

There are many things that children who are raised outside a family do not understand. Often they don’t know how to make tea or peel potatoes, how to calculate a family budget; they don’t know that to buy bread one has to go to a bakery. They got used to live with everything provided and lack the necessary experience for an independent life. However, we cannot reject the boarding school system yet, because we don’t have enough foster families for orphans or adoptive parents. With rare exceptions, every orphaned child dreams of a family, and they all need a model for a normal family relationship. We have to seek new ways to present a disadvantaged child a chance to feel a full member of society. There is a project to create an experimental ground at the Bucha Boarding School in Kyiv oblast and Kyiv Boarding School No. 3. The idea of the experiment is to give these schools’ pupils an opportunity to periodically spend some time with normal families, simultaneously processing their study at the boarding schools. Two families have already finished their training for this experiment. However, children also need some training for even a temporarily stay with a family. We need special methods to be worked out, considering the child’s unique personality practically on an individual basis.