An institution deciding to move their children to family-based care – or being ordered to by their government – has a big job ahead of it. Just showing the children the door is not going to be enough and would lead to a lot of suffering and trauma among the children. It would be likely to lead to children ending up living on the street and/or being targeted for trafficking and sexual exploitation.
Making the move to family-based care needs to be responsibly handled and carefully planned. So, in this blog I will put forward some of the things that are very important to make sure of.
To start with, someone needs to be hired to oversee the transition from institutional to family-based care. Making this transition is a big and complicated undertaking that is going to take a lot of time. Everyone working at the institution before you start already has a full-time job, so it is not possible to do a proper job of managing the transition if the other job keeps getting in the way. It is often useful to hire some other people as well, such as social workers and psychologists, to help the manager get all the work done, but this can be done gradually. The manager is needed from the start.
Once the manager is in place, the first stage is not moving children out of the institution, it is gathering information. Lots of information. Information should be gathered about the kind of family-based care that is already available in the area – either run by the government or by NGOs – and what is needed to make sure your children can make use of this. Information should be gathered about the main reasons why children end up in your institution, to see what kind of community services are needed to prevent this, and to find out which of these services already exist, and which ones you or other organisations in the area would be able to set up.
Information also needs to be gathered about the children in your care: Where do they come from? What was the reason they ended up in your institution? Do they have relatives who could take care of them? What kind of support would those relatives need to be able to care for them? Does the child have siblings, and if so, are they at home, in your institution, or in other institutions? Does the child have any problems or special needs that need to be addressed? That is just the start. This information should be collected by going through the children’s files, by talking to the children themselves and by talking to the children’s family members – this is where the social workers and psychologists come in handy. With all the information gathered, an individual plan should be made for where the child will be going (back to the family – if so, with what support? -, to a foster family, to be adopted, or to a small group home). Where possible this plan should be made together with the child’s caregiver, a social worker and a psychologist, the child’s family (and/or foster parents etc.) and the child itself.
When it is clear where the child will be going and the receiving family is lined up and has received training to actually receive the child, it is still not time to just wave off the child. Having the child leave from one day to the next is likely to be a very traumatic experience for the child, which can lead to serious psychological and behavioural problems, making it likely that the receiving family ends up not being able to cope with the child and the placement breaking down (again a traumatic experience for the child). Instead, a careful preparation plan must be made, and executed, to help the child understand what is going on, to give closure for the time in the institution and to make sure that the child is familiar with where he is going before he leaves.
Once the child has moved to a family-based situation, the job is not done. Continued monitoring and evaluation of the child’s situation and the support and/or training that the family may need, to continue to care for the child, are essential parts of the process.
This is not all that is involved in moving children from an institution to family-based care. Only the elements that I have seen forgotten or skipped over in practice, despite the best intentions and an eagerness to improve the child’s situation.
I would like to thank Lumos, for allowing me to attend their training a couple of years ago, and to participate in their pilot online course this year, where I gained a deeper insight in how essential all these elements are.
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