Family and Child Welfare

Family and Child Welfare 3 (3+0)

Lesson 34 : Institutional Services

Principles of Institutional Care

There are some broad principles which must be borne in mind while providing institutional care and services to the various categories of children.

1. The children who are deprived of security of a normal family life need love and care in conditions as closely approxi­mate to home as possible.
   
2. In home environments, the children are able to express their fears and dissatisfaction, as much as their hopes and aspirations, which should be understood by the worker, to help the child to overcome his difficulties and meet his felt needs.
   
3. The child has emotional needs. The worker must re­cognize the sense of loss and frustration on the child's part. He should, therefore, be a friend and a counsellor to the child.
   
4. Factors of physical, mental, academic or athletic abi­lities are of great significance in conditioning the child's res­ponse to his environment. Emotional and intellectual growth of the child should receive as much attention as physical growth.
   
5. The worker should understand the child as an indi­vidual with all his strength and weaknesses and must learn to accept him.
   
6. The institution should offer him the maximum oppor­tunity for development. Individual attention should be paid to each child recognizing that everyone bas different abilities, skills and needs. The institution should provide democratic group-living experience in a warm and accepting atmosphere, as the next best substitute for a home.
   
7. There should be balance between over-regimentation on one hand and undirected and chaotic conditions on the other.
   
8. Discipline should come from within the group and there should be a minimum of super imposition.
   
9. Responsibilities should be given to the children in the institution, so that, they consider themselves as useful part of the institution's life.

Even today, there are institutions which are 'closed' or ‘walled’; there are barbed wires around the institutions and a jail-like atmosphere is still prevailing in some of them. There is a tendency to name such institutions as orphanages instead of children's homes, ashrams or other names in local language which would develop a sense of pride rather than a stigma of in belonging to an institution.