Where Do Institutionalized Children Come From?

"Why do children have to live in an orphanage?" is another question that needs an answer keeping in mind that only a rather small percentage of the children are both motherless and fatherless. Where do the other children that have at least one parent come from? Why do they have to live in an institution instead of continuing living in their families? Here are the answers to these questions, the causes beyond the forsaken child's condition:

1. Divorce rate growing.

The marital pattern diminished and perverted. Traditional family crumbling.

The contemporary society is characterized by the disappearance of the gilded age of family stability. The analysis indicate the dramatic increase of divorce percentage in the last years all over the world.

At the end of the 20-th century, there was a change in the traditional family pattern: maternity and paternity are no longer classical and traditional and this happens because of several reasons:

Firstly, there are families with more than two parents, also with children from different marriages or cohabitation.

Secondly, the "marriage" concept suffered a change of meaning; there are multitudes of families who don't have a marriage certificate or a nuptial contract. Often, marriage is not a social base for an emotional relationship between partners, but concubinage.

Divorce is a psycho-social complex and implies different dimensions such as: emotional, economical, parental, and psychological. The separation crisis sometimes causes children to run away from their homes: these have identity problems in most of the cases because they can't find the balance in the parental broken pattern. Many times divorces are the result of domestic violence and the children had assisted to it all.

The family changing pattern annalists consider four types of families as presenting risks: 1.the illegitimate type of family where the partners are not officially married but they have children and also the social, emotional and economical conditions found in a normal family. 2. The "empty home" type of family characterized by concubinage and the dominance is apathy. 3. Family in crises where one of the partners is temporarily absent (in the army or in prison) or permanently absent (deceased) and 4. The disjointed family characterized by divorce, separation or relinquishment. Family types no. 3 and 4 are types of families that usually generate run away children and teenagers .These children will become "street's children" or teenagers' bends. Now, this is where the children in children homes come from.

2. Domestic violence

The case when the children are abused during inter-familial violence is grave because of the consequences: the aggressive boys risk to became aggressors themselves in their future families; the abused girls manifest the tendency of choosing violent partners when they reach maturity, partners which imitate the spectrum of their ex-aggressors (fathers, brothers etc).

3. Street children

There are street children everywhere in the world, the phenomenon is present regardless of the communist past of a country. UNICEF states that at the end of the 20-th century there were 150 million minors living in such condition (as street children), the great majority being in South America, India, Philippines, Russia,(Moscow and Sankt Petersburg).

The investigators categorize the children living on the streets as: streets' children, vagabonds and delinquent children. The street children are also named "problem children", "minors in danger"," vagabonds children" and "run away children". The city is the space where these youngsters live: on the streets, abandoned buildings, railway stations, metro stations, supermarkets, parking stations etc.

Institutions and specialized annalists made different classifications of the street children. One of them is a classification based on the time they spend on the street:

a. Permanent street children-those who have completely broke relations with their families and society;

b. Occasional street children-those who still have some connection with their families where they go back sometimes, they can be reintegrated;

c. Street "workers"-those who accomplish different little works on the street (selling newspapers etc.) or those who are sent to bag on the streets. The one who sends them can be their parents or a bagger leader in the area.

The classification according to familial situation delimits street children as follows:

a. adventurers -life on the streets is perceived by these children as being exotic .In this case the vagabondage is episodically practiced ;
b. those who became street children as a protest against their families(here we find neglected children or youngsters coming from disjointed or large families )
c. children who have been exposed to violence in their families(beaten or sexually molested etc.)

What Do These Children Want/Wish for?

Most of these minors want to go to school (in their mind, they see school as a community of "normal children".) They also wish for a place to sleep, they want to work and not lastly, they want to go back to their families (if the case) or to find a family of their own.

Stability and a home, oh these are such precious things!