Seeing the trees within the forest: addressing the needs of children without parental care in the Russian Federation.
In this essay, we comment on the dominant practice in high-resource societies of placing children without biological parental care (CwoBPC) into substitution families, and the promotion of this solution as evidence-based and state of the art. As the Russian Federation has formulated and is now addressing in matching legislation, it possibly overestimated the role of substitution families and underestimated the importance of specialized institutions in addressing the CwoBPC issue. Although we do not question the overall benefit of placing all CwoBPC in adequate family settings, we question the specifics of its realization in particular societies, including that of modern Russia. We argue for the importance of a mixed model, in which informed and supervised family placements are combined with high-quality family-environment institutional settings as the most appropriate model for middle- and, perhaps, even high-resource societies, especially for young children and children with disabilities. Diversifying placements based on the individual needs of each CwoBPC, especially children with special needs, is what is best for these children.
Department of Psychology Division, Child and Parent Mental Health and Early Intervention, St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation; Laboratory of Translational Science of Early Childhood, St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation.
Rifkat J
RJ
Muhamedrahimov
Elena L
EL
Grigorenko
D002648:Child; D002654:Child Care / Q000592:standards*; D002670:Child, Abandoned; D005581:Foster Home Care / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D019372:Orphanages / Q000592:standards*; D012426:Russia