Substitute family care – the waiting time for the desired child in the Prešov region
Introduction
The legal system of the Slovak Republic recognizes several forms of substitute family care (“NRS”). Of these, two—foster care and adoption—are in the competence of the Offices of Labour, Social Affairs and Family (ÚPSVaR), designated for mediating substitute family care (hereinafter only “designated ÚPSVaR”). For the purpose of mediating NRS, designated ÚPSVaRs keep overviews of children for whom NRS must be mediated and also lists of applicants who want to become foster or adoptive parents. The existing composition of children requiring substitute families and the applicants’ ideas about foster care or adoption differ markedly. As a result, children’s homes are still full of children and applicants for NRS keep waiting longer and longer for their desired child.
The purpose of this contribution is to point to the already existing and worsening, unfavorable situation for disadvantaged children, and also to consider how the imbalance between applicants and children can be changed in favour of children who are waiting.
Substitute family care under Act No. 305/2005 Z. z. on Social and Legal Protection of Children and Social Curatorship and on the amendment and supplementation of certain laws in the wording of later regulations (hereinafter only “the SPODaSK Act”) includes foster care and adoption (adoption). Unlike Act No. 36/2005 Z. z. on Family and on the amendment and supplementation of certain laws in the wording of later regulations, which does not consider adoption as substitute family care. According to the drafter of the Family Act, with adoption the legal consequences for the child differ so significantly that adoption was not considered suitable to be subsumed under forms of substitute family care. The SPODaSK Act, however, attached adoption to substitute family care together with foster care, as foster care and adoption are fundamentally linked by some statutory conditions under which they can arise.
Mediation of foster care and adoption is the original competence of designated Offices of Labour, Social Affairs and Family, in the departments of social legal child protection and social curatorship; there are eight of these in the territory of the Slovak Republic. The SPODaSK Act sets the conditions for entering a child into the overview and for entering an applicant for NRS into the list of applicants, i.e. the necessary prerequisites that must precede mediation of NRS.
Overview of children
Each designated ÚPSVaR, for the purpose of mediating NRS to children who had to be removed from their biological family environment, keeps the mentioned overview of such children. Children enter the designated ÚPSVaR overview through notification by the child social protection and social curatorship authorities, which are part of each Office of Labour, Social Affairs and Family in the Slovak Republic. The notification of a child is the result of social work with the child’s family, when a competent social worker together with the facility where the child is placed confirms that the child cannot stay in, or return to, the biological family in the short term and there is no close person to the child who would take over care.
At present, emphasis is placed on the right of the child to voice opinions on all matters concerning him or her, provided that in view of age and mental maturity, he or she can understand the matter and express a view. Children’s opinions on substitute family care are not unequivocal. From the presented reports on children’s psychological development, we see that not all children, especially older ones, express an interest in making contact with a potential substitute family. Some children have adapted over the long years of institutional care to the system, have their own views, habits, and developing life styles and express a negative view on mediation of NRS. Sometimes in older children, interest in NRS is connected with the idea of greater personal freedom, and as practice in the Prešov region has shown, in most cases mediation of NRS for children in puberty and adolescence was unsuccessful. On the other hand, many children perceive the possibility of finding “their own family” with hope and expectations, but the applicants’ ideas displace the hopes and expectations of children older than approximately 6–7 years into the realm of fiction.
In the overview of the designated ÚPSVaR Prešov, there are currently 206 children, for whom NRS has not been mediated. These are children who are in over 95% ethnically, age-, health- and sibling-group disadvantaged. The overview covers all age categories of children, with 157 children of the total number being in sibling pairs, trios, and up to seven-member sibling groups, as shown in Table 1.
Table No. 1: Children in the Prešov Region Overview
Legend: A: child adoptable, suitable for adoption PS: child suitable for foster care List of applicants
For the purpose of mediating NRS to children who need it, the designated ÚPSVaR keeps a list of applicants for NRS. The list of applicants is one list, and it includes applicants with different motivations, interested both in performing foster care and in adoption, for children from infancy to around younger school age (although in the overview there are children also just before reaching adulthood).
The primary task of the designated ÚPSVaR is to find, for children listed in the overview, stable and functional families that will be able to fulfil all of their developmental needs. This task is, however, heavily limited by applicants’ motivation and their idea of the child they would be willing to admit into their home.
Applicants refine their idea of the child, closely related to their motivation, during preparation for NRS, which they are required to attend for at least 26 hours, and if they are interested in intercountry adoption, for at least 30 hours. Preparation provides legal information about the differences between individual forms of substitute care, their consequences and conditions within their legal sphere, about the rights and obligations of biological parents and substitute parents, about developmental needs of children in individual age groups, maladaptive forms of behaviour in children from children’s homes, and ways to respond to developmental anomalies of children that are based on both hereditary and social grounds. Applicants also receive further information and answers to questions relevant to this issue. They are subjected to psychodiagnostics, and from its conclusions they learn their strengths and weaknesses and, especially, how to use them in the benefit of the child they accept. A change in priorities and idea of the child can occur during preparation, though this is rare.
In relation to the need to find substitute families for children who need them and the related maintenance of the applicant list, we learn how many childless marriages desire a child so strongly that they are ready to enter the process of being recorded in the applicants’ list and of mediating a relationship with another child. We believe that married couples who decide to address childlessness also through adoption constitute only a minority of all childless couples in the Prešov region as well as in Slovakia as a whole. The motivation of these applicants, therefore, is to obtain a child that would resemble, as much as possible, their own biological child.
Such motivated applicants do not change their idea: they know the composition of children in children’s homes and may express pity for the fate of children, but that is all. They do not realise that the purpose of keeping an applicants’ list is to mediate NRS to children in the overview and that if this list ceased to exist, the list of applicants would also cease.
In the list of applicants for NRS in the Prešov region, there are currently 174 applicants lawfully registered. Applicants for adoption prevail by far, with 150 such applicants. Three declare readiness to accept a disadvantaged child, specifically on an ethnic basis. The number of applicants for fostering is 14; those who chose both forms of NRS is 10. It is necessary to clarify that of the given number of applicants for adoption, 27 already had a child mediated and are waiting for court judgments that will establish them as parents. From the number of applicants for fostering, 12 already had a child also mediated and are waiting for a court decision on entrusting the child to their foster care.
Table No. 2: Number of applicants in the Prešov region
Legend: A: adopters, PS: foster care applicants Figure No. 1: Number of applicants in the Prešov region
Legend: Ž: applicants, A+: mediated A, PS+: mediated PS On desired children and waiting time
Applicants for substitute family care in the Prešov region were always, before preparation or during preparation for NRS, informed about different lengths of “waiting for a child,” depending on the applicant’s idea of the child. This practical measure becomes increasingly important as waiting time keeps lengthening. It is the simplest way to avoid serious expressions of dissatisfaction from applicants, whose only priority is to have a child according to their expectations, preferably immediately. In introductory meetings with us, they paradoxically point out that children’s homes are full. After being informed about the composition of our children in children’s homes, they are forced to work with the idea of long waiting, to change their expectation, to reconcile themselves with the fact that they may never have a child, or they attempt to obtain a child by non-legal means.
Applicants who decided for some children in the overview are at different points in the applicants’ list, mainly in its second half. The period they waited for a child was not relatively short. Some children were mediated within one year, some in two to three years after registration on the applicant list, especially those applicants who decided to accept an ethnically disadvantaged child, both into foster care and adoption; those interested only in a girl had a longer wait.
We noted the strongly dominant number of adoption applicants, especially for adoption of a majority, the youngest possible child, ideally a newborn. Applicants who stayed with this idea of an adoptee under one year old waited six to seven years for the child. This was still the case at the turn of 2017–2018; today even that is no longer true. Currently, for applicants on the list, the eighth year of waiting for a child has begun. The time has long passed when anyone could adopt whomever they wanted. It was once enough to announce it on the agora (public square) before a gathering of citizens, from the stone from which proclamations were made. The adoptive parent had at the same time to give his/her hetairia (in ancient Greece a private political association whose members worshipped shared cults and supported one another) sacrificial livestock and a jug of wine (Valachovič, 2003). Today, conditions of child adoptability and subsequent adoption are strictly defined, taking into account international conventions implemented into the legal system of the Slovak Republic.
Waiting eight years for a much-expected child is truly a very long time. Some applicants manage in the meantime to fulfil the parental role in a natural way. For others, years pass in anxiety as to whether their wish will be fulfilled within an age-acceptable period for them. Applicants who are determined to continue waiting for the desired child are unlikely to be influenced by our intervention, and only time will show how their situation in the applicants’ list will develop further. Perhaps advances in healthcare will eventually reduce the high number of involuntarily childless couples.
About disadvantaged children
A child can be considered disadvantaged primarily by a combination of several disadvantages, namely ethnicity, membership in a sibling group, higher age, and health disadvantage, with this order reflecting the degree of disadvantage from highest to relatively lowest. In the interest of our children in children’s homes, we should try to find and then apply ways to “discover” and encourage individuals to become foster parents regardless of any disadvantage of the child, and to perceive the child as he or she is, with one single goal: to provide everything that helps them achieve the full extent of their physical and psychological possibilities and prepares them for their life path.
Professional parenting, which is part of institutional care for the child, has enabled all children to grow up in a family at least until six years of age, to experience the benefits of individual care, to get to know functional family life, the role of mother and father, and to perceive and understand siblinghood, grandparenthood, and so on. Nevertheless, this is still a form of institutional care, manifesting negatively, for example during the professional parent’s vacation period, during which the child is moved to another professional family or to a children’s home group. Institutional care ends with reaching adulthood; if that is when the child usually returns from a professional family to the children’s home collective, as often at about six years of age, the young adult is fortunate if he or she manages to establish their own family successfully and integrate into working life.
Every child, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, or any other specifics, who shows interest in having a foster or adoptive family (if they cannot have their own), should therefore be accommodated in the child’s best interests. Our reflections thus move toward more intensive recruitment of foster families willing to care for children disadvantaged by age, health or ethnicity. Professional parenting, which provides care especially to disadvantaged children, has already been established on the territory of the Slovak Republic and has introduced to the environment in which professional families live a different perspective on children in substitute care, because children are brought up to respect and follow expected ways of life.
Professional parenting is linked with benefits such as pension-service crediting, insurance contributions, regular income, a support network of experts, and a recognized professional position. Support for foster families is not nearly as intensive. It is lacking in both financial provisions and moral recognition. In contrast, foster parents are expected to demonstrate financial solvency and, in addition to their own work commitments, the ability to meet all material and non-material needs of a disadvantaged child, often with behavioural disorders and physical or psychological difficulties. Therefore, motivation to become a foster parent of a disadvantaged child is very low. If the foster parent’s remuneration, equal to the amount allocated per child in children’s homes together with other benefits of professional parents, were sufficient to be motivating, one could state that not necessarily all children from children’s homes but the overwhelming majority of them have their family. We believe none of these benefits will be a priority motivator for potential foster parents, as the complexity of work with predominantly older disadvantaged children is overwhelmingly greater.
Conclusion
Mediating substitute family care for children who need it involves many demanding moments, but also many beautiful bonus moments, when adoptive parents come to share their joy with us because they already have “their” child, or foster parents come proudly to present new successes of a placed child.
At the position of mediating substitute family care for children who need it, there can be no greater reward than a successful matching of a child with substitute parents. Another bonus is successful biological parenthood for every married couple from the applicants’ list. The wish is to have as much of both as possible: that every child has their family and everyone who longed for a child has their child.
Author: Mgr. Otília Hažírová The author is an employee of ÚPSVaR Prešov, Department of Social Legal Child Protection and Social Curatorship in Prešov. References:
- Valachovič, Pavol. 2003. Zákonníky starovekých národov. Bratislava: Univerzita Komenského, 50 strán, ISBN 802231787X
- Act of the National Council of the Slovak Republic No. 305/2005 Z. z. on Social and Legal Protection of Children and Social Curatorship and Amendment and Supplementation of Certain Acts in the wording of later regulations
- Act No. 36/2005 Z. z. on Family and on the amendment and supplementation of certain acts in the wording of later regulations