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Introduction
Children placed in institutional care are deprived of their fundamental right to living in a family environment. The Romanian state would greatly improve their situation, if it took care of preventing the separation of children from their family, instead of focusing on the current model - placing in care about 63,000 children, while hundreds of thousands of them still live in inhumane conditions. These are the ones that specialised public authorities pretend they do not see, because they lack the capacity for legislative framework design to prevent the separation of…
This report summarizes the discussions and activities held at Eurochild’s 11th Annual Conference, co-hosted by Hope and Homes for Children in Bucharest, Romania on 26-28 November 2014. The event, which focused on “better public spending for better outcomes for children and families,” brought together representatives from civil society and government as well as researchers, other professionals, and young people themselves from 36 countries in Europe. The group was convened with the purpose of developing “a clear and convincing narrative to bring those people on board who still believe…
This video features a segment of a talk on the effects of care environments on children, hosted by the Christian Alliance for Orphans. The key speakers featured include Dr. Kathryn Whetten & Dr. Charles Nelson, who discuss the Positive Outcomes for Orphans study (POFO) and the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), respectively.
Dr. Nelson speaks about the institutionalization of children and its impact on the brain development of institutionalized children. Many children in institutions, says Dr. Nelson, experience isolation, a lack of response to distress, a…
In this important chapter of the Handbook of Child Well-Being, the authors review the findings from research on the cognitive and social-emotional development of children exposed to various natural experiments in which the quality of parenting or family environment could be placed on a continuum. The authors first review findings on the social-emotional and cognitive development of children reared in institutional care. As an illustration they present two studies involved children reared in institutions in Ukraine and Greece.…
The Infant Mental Health Journal has published an important Special Issue on Global Research, Practice, and Policy Issues in the Care of Infants and Young Children at Risk.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), The Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (The Hague Permanent Bureau, 1993), and the Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children (2009) have provided a comprehensive, rights-based framework and guidance for developing domestic adoption and alternative, family based…
This document is a Romanian language summary brochure of the Manual of Best Practice titled ‘Child Abandonment and its Prevention in Europe,’ specific to child abandonment in Romania. For the complete manual (in English) please click here.
©In collaboration with: For Our Children Foundation, Life Together Association, University of Copenhagen, University of Lyon, Family Child Youth Association, Paramos Vaikams Centras…
This document is an English language summary brochure of the Manual of Best Practice titled ‘Child Abandonment and its Prevention in Europe,’ specific to child abandonment in Romania. For the complete manual (in English) please click here.
©In collaboration with: For Our Children Foundation, Life Together Association, University of Copenhagen, University of Lyon, Family Child Youth Association, Paramos Vaikams…
Day care centers, further referred to as DCC, are child protection services aiming at preventing child abandonment and institutionalization, by providing, during daytime, activities such as care, education, recreation-socializing, counseling, development of independent life skills, school and professional guidance etc. for children, and support, counseling, education activities for parents or legal representatives, as well as for other individuals having children in care.
The services provided by DCC are complementary to the efforts of the child’s own family, as these derive from parental…
The reforms undertaken during the transition to a market economy have had an uneven and divergent social impact on the countries within the Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region. It is now recognized by governments in many parts of the region that the policy of using institutional care for children with welfare needs is both ineffective and expensive. Despite reforms, the quality of care within institutions and in the new community- based services is still inconsistent and in many cases does not meet the requirements of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The…
One of the legacies of the command economy in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (Europe and Central Asia or ECA region) is a social protection system for vulnerable individuals which focuses heavily on institutional care. Universal social protection was provided to families in the form of guaranteed jobs and old-age pensions, as well as child allowances and benefits in kind such as housing, education, and health care. If an individual needed help beyond this level of universal support, an institutional placement was offered where available. Families, in turn were…