Foster care is conducive to giving orphaned children a better life For most children living in orphanages, having a real home is just a pipe dream. Although they may be well looked after, receive a good education and proper nutrition, the love and care that come from being part of a real family just aren’t there. And how must it be for institutions that house well over 100 children under the same roof? Just getting through one day at a time is in itself a mammoth challenge for orphanage staff.
But for Robert Glover, social transformation for orphans is the kind of challenge he’s up for. Through sheer dedication and a sense of compassion, the Briton has helped thousands of Chinese orphans gain or regain their sense of family by introducing the “foster care” approach to orphanages across the country.
Glover has rich experience in child care from working in this field for many years in Britain, and over the years he has noticed that some children don’t do well in institutions. This, he said, is because they help create dependent, dysfunctional people. “You become dependent on society and you become dysfunctional in the sense that you can’t live well in a community or society,” he explained.
Glover first came to China in 1996, working for the British Government before becoming involved with managing social services at Care for Children, a non-profit organization based in Beijing.
Family life, better care
According to research by Glover and his colleagues, many children whose parents grew up in institutions end up in institutional care themselves. To address some of these issues, they started out with a simple question: How does a boy learn to be a father, if he doesn’t have a father to learn from?
It’s important that children have role models and it’s important that they are integrated into society, Glover said. “Otherwise you can have a whole generation of dependent people who create another generation of the same,” he told Beijing Review. He believes that family-based care is an alternative for the children and also a positive way to “break the cycle of dependency.”
Glover and his organization, Care for Children, subsequently introduced the practice of foster care to China. This means family-based care to relieve the distress and illness of disabled and orphaned children. The pilot program was initiated in Shanghai at the invitation of local officials in 1997.
According to Glover, in the year he started the program of placing children from state-run orphanages into local foster families in Shanghai, orphanage staff around the city just couldn’t cope with the numbers of children in their care.
“When I came to China, I noticed two things,” Glover recalled. “Everybody was looking at the crisis of children living in orphanages, but when you looked at the child social service organizations, you could see that there was also a staff crisis.”
A Care for Children’s survey shows most orphanages in China have 200 or 300 children. At the end of 2001, the country had a total of 160 orphanages.
“In England and most developed countries, we don’t have children’s homes of more than 20 children. Most homes usually have 10 children, so they can be run more like a family unit,” Glover said. “If the numbers are too big, you can’t give enough attention to the children.”
Glover therefore moved up to 50 percent of the children, in most of the cases, into families and communities, allowing the staff breathing room to be trained and to adopt a more professional approach. From a planning perspective, he said, as more children are placed into families, the old orphanage buildings could be revamped and made more modern and comfortable.
Care for Children does not suggest every child should go into a family, but insists that there should be alternatives to choose from.
“When they are older, we ask them whether they would rather be in a family or an orphanage,” Glover said, adding that decisions for the very young are made by the orphanage and Care for Children has trained staff who are experts at identifying a child’s needs.
He told Beijing Review, “It is easy to see which children have a strong sense of attachment, by the way they reach out to be hugged when adults visit the orphanage. We can assess that these children are better placed in families.”
Ultimately some children will be chosen for international adoption and some will be chosen for domestic adoption. Some
children live in long-term foster family homes and some children live better in orphanage care. “No one option is better than others. You make the right choice for the right child,” Glover continued.
Foster care requirements
During Care for Children’s four-year pilot project in Shanghai, the organization placed 400 orphans into families and trained the orphanage staff in all aspects of family placement work. Glover said it’s a whole management process that sees the right child go to the right home. He calls it the “complementary” approach, now in place for the benefit of Shanghai’s orphaned children.
When considering potential foster parents, Glover said that wealth is not always the main criterion. “The children need people with a good heart who can work through problems and won’t give up,” he said. This often results in ordinary couples being well received as foster parents.
A background check is done on each family to assess their suitability, as besides providing love and the basic needs of the children, it is vital to ensure the families involved are not people who would neglect or abuse children.
Glover thinks highly of the supportive network in China. He said China’s foster care system is on the right track because culturally, the Chinese are family-oriented and have a strong sense of community. According to him, in developed countries, the breakdown rate is 25 percent, meaning one in four children may return to a group home, while in China the breakdown rate is only 7 percent. He attributed this to the Chinese people’s dedicated family lifestyle and good adult support system.
One of the central components of foster care is a mother’s love. “Everywhere in the world, not only in China, if a child is deprived of his/her mother’s love, it can develop mental illness, physical illness and some of them even die,” Glover said, explaining that their research shows that weak children placed into families would visibly change after being given maternal care.
Recruiting families is now the least of Care for Children’s worries as the list of those applying has grown. In 2003, there was a waiting list of 500 families in Shanghai alone, he said, explaining that many families want the opportunity to have a second child.
There is no conflict between fostering children and China’s one-child policy, according to Glover. Actually, the Chinese Government has already recognized the benefits of foster care, which is cheaper than running orphanages, so it allows and encourages families to foster children, he told Beijing Review.
After the Shanghai project, Care for Children was internationally evaluated and highly rated. They then replicated the pilot project in Kunming, Chengdu and Yinchuan, with similar success. The organization is now working with 120 orphanages in China and has developed training materials to teach staff how to train foster parents and how to place children into families.
Cristopher Hum, former British Ambassador to China, thinks highly of the efforts of Care for Children. He said, “Working from Beijing I am aware of the tremendous impact which this successful cooperation between the Shanghai authorities and Care for Children had.”
His remarks were echoed by former British Consulate General of Shanghai, Paul Sizeland, who commented, “I firmly believe that it represents a model of the best practice and shows the
potential for cooperation on social issues between the UK and China.”
Building Partnerships
Care for Children, with a vision to see 1 million children in families by 2010, carries out its “foster care” program in China at the request of, and in cooperation with, national and local authorities.
After the pilot program in Shanghai, the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs invited the organization to operate in 15 cities and counties in China, including Urumqi, Yinchuan, Baotou, Beijing, Xining, Lanzhou, Datong, Yan’an, Bengbu, Chengdu, Wuhan, Hengfeng, Jingdong, Guiyang and Yuncheng. “The ministry is planning to place 50 percent of the children in orphanages into foster care by 2008,” Robert Glover, Executive Director of Care for Children, told Beijing Review. He and his organization believe “this is real genuine effort of the Chinese Government to make the life of orphanage children different.”
For a foster child, the organization pays half of the total costs of clothing, food, schooling, medical and other daily necessities. For each family fostering a child, Care for Children and the Chinese Government pay an equal share of 150 yuan per month.
Care for Children is recognized by the Chinese Government as a charity organization, so it is offered tax-free status. During the first three years of operation, it was funded by the British Government, but now it finances itself through overseas donations, as well as receiving support from big companies with corporate responsibility programs. A new initiative with Shangri-La, to use its extensive network of luxury hotels as donation-gathering venues, was also recently put in place.