When you start talking about the need to move away from institutional childcare, towards family-based care, you are often confronted with the argument: ‘it is too expensive, we cannot afford to move way from institutions’. It is a very persistent myth that institutional childcare is the most efficient, cost-effective way to care for children without parental care.
Since these days the best way to convince anyone of your point of view is to come with a financial argument, let’s have a look at the real cost of institutionalisation, not just in the moment, but in the long run.
In fact, research has shown again, and again, that caring for a child in an institutional setting is 6-20 times more expensive than funding things like family support and community services that will allow the child to stay with their own family, foster care and almost all forms of small group home care (the only exception is good specialised small group home care for children with very complicated special needs, this is more expensive than regular institutional care; but here it is not a comparison between two equivalent options: in regular institutional care the child would barely hang on to life, or die, while in good specialised small group home care he can thrive).
Interestingly enough, this is almost always as far as the argument is taken: looking at the cost of the moment, of caring for the child. While I agree it is already a pretty good argument to say that you could provide better care, with better outcomes, for 6-20 times less money, there is a wider argument to be made, which I think should not be ignored.
In a previous blog (which you can find HERE) we have looked at what institutionalisation does to children. We established that there are very severe, permanent consequences to institutionalisation. These consequences, which lead to young adults not being able to cope in the outside world, come with a cost to society, and that cost should logically also be taken into account when talking about the cost of institutionalisation.
Young adults who come out of institutions being 10x more likely to end up in prostitution, 40x more likely to end up with a criminal record and 500x more likely to commit suicide, plus an overall greater chance of ending up living in the street, has a societal cost. Money needs to be put into the police and justice system, the prison system and the hospital system to deal with these things.
Added to that is the fact that someone who has grown up without having had their essential needs met, without being nurtured and without having had the chance to form attachments, will struggle very much to raise their own children if they have them. Their brain is not wired to know how to give their child what they were never given themselves. This means that when adults who were institutionalised themselves as children have their own children, they are very likely to need a lot of support from social services to be able to cope. And even with that support, they may not be able to manage and may have their children removed from them for the protection of the children.
This turns the problem not only into an expensive one, but also into a generational one. Particularly if the next generation of children is also put into an institution, instead of in family-based care. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
So, while a cost for care that is higher by 6-20 times is already excessive, even when looking only at the financial side of things, the cost is in fact a lot higher than that. And that is not even taking into account the cost of human suffering that is connected to it.
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