It is very rare, only a very small percentage of children without parental care, but it does sometimes happen that it is not possible to find a place for a child with their extended family, nor in a foster family and the situation is not such that an adoptive family would be appropriate. Usually these children are older, often teenagers, and have complicated challenging behaviour that is difficult to deal with in a family. Or they are children with complex, severe multiple special needs.
What to do with these children? Should they go into an institution? I presume that by now you can predict that the answer here is ‘no’. In this blog we will look at what then.
As we have established in the course of various blogs in 2018, growing up in an institution is going to do more damage than good. So, sending children who are already struggling with mental, intellectual or physical issues into an institution is not going to help them. Instead these children tend to do better in so-called ‘small group homes’.
Small group homes are a form of residential care where no more than 12 children – though in many cases the number is much closer to 4-6 children – live together in a house or a flat within the community. They are cared for by a number of paid, dedicated caregivers. So, although there is not one person who is always there, like in a real family, the people working in a particular group home do not rotate to other group homes and they get to know the children they care for very well. This allows bonds to be formed and trust and care to build. These caregivers are also trained to deal with the special needs of the children in their care. And they are monitored and provided with guidance.
While small group homes are not actual family situations, they do try to imitate family situations as much as possible. Plus, the fact that the home is based within the community, rather than in a remote, cut-off location, helps the children take part in regular daily life. This gives them a better opportunity to learn about how the real world works and to prepare for the time when they will be living independently in the world.
In most of North-Western Europe, North America and Australia and New Zealand small group homes are the only residential care still in existence for children. And in other countries around the world the development of small group homes systems is becoming more and more common. One pitfall people moving toward family-based care need to watch out for, is not to just decide to break up the large-scale institutions up into small group homes and then continue with that.
While children do a lot better in small group homes than they do in large-scale institutions, they do not do as well in them as they do in foster families, adoptive families or with their extended family. In the first stages of deinstitutionalisation, small group homes will be needed in somewhat greater numbers. Both because the foster care system may not have fully developed yet, and because many children coming out of institutions have been in them for many years and may have very severe mental health and behavioural issues as a result, making it much harder to find families able to take them in.
However, over time, as most of the children requiring placements will be coming from their family of origin rather than from an institution that is closing down, far fewer of them will have such severe issues, meaning that more of them will be able to be placed in a real family situation. So, the establishment of small group homes, should be seen as an interim measure, with the goal of reducing the number of children in them over time.
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