Orphanages in China are private and public. A society that has orphanages has no future Orphanage in China

« A society in which there are orphanages and the number of abandoned children is constantly increasing has no future. In a society in which homeless children appear, parents abandon their own children, there is no sense of continuity and kinship, in this society the lines of good and evil are erased ».

So says banker Roman Avdeev. Several years ago, he realized that helping orphanages financially from the outside would not change anything. Then he adopted 16 children. When he brought 8 children to be baptized at once, the church did not immediately understand where so many children came from: “These are my children!” – Avdeev answered proudly. “Who is this,” the employee asked, pointing to the nannies who were holding a baby each. “And these are my wives!” Avdeev joyfully explained. The joke was warmly received. Avdeev adopts children under the age of one year, without specifically choosing children and without changing the names given in the orphanage.

Why Roman Avdeev considers the system of orphanages to be ineffective, what to do with foreign adoptions, and why there is no life for a country where there are orphanages - he spoke about this in an interview with the editor-in-chief of Pravmir, Anna Danilova.

– Roman Ivanovich, so why does a society where there are orphans have no future?

– These words should not be understood in an economic sense - the increase in the number of orphanages does not bother society economically.

Of the 18 thousand adoptive parents of children from Russia, 3 thousand are foreigners. That's almost 20%! I already understood that we have few adoptive parents, but the official figures (data from the Chairman of the Supreme Court of Russia V. Lebedev - editor's note) simply knocked me down, but if you look at it realistically, then every fourth child In Russia, citizens of other countries adopt. This is a shame for the nation!

– Today the question is often raised about banning the adoption of our children abroad - alarming news comes from there, children adopted from Russia regularly die there...

– Of course, I am deeply outraged by stories with the return of children and especially with death. But Americans never hush up such tragic cases in foster care. I would also like to see statistics on what is happening in Russia with foster families. It probably exists, but for some reason they are bashfully silent about these figures. And the Americans do not steal our children and secretly take them out of the country. These are our homeless abandoned children for whom society cannot create conditions for life in their homeland. Every year, 50 thousand children are abandoned in maternity hospitals and several thousand more are taken from dysfunctional families. What future do they have? What are we here in Russia ready to do for them?

It seems to me that in our society very often some kind of false pride arises, here we are Russians, we are Orthodox, we are a special people who have a special relationship with God. What if some strange people come from overseas, we have a confrontation with them in the field of economics and geopolitics, and they also adopt our children! And at the same time, it is completely forgotten that the very opportunity to adopt Russian children in the United States arises solely because they are homeless in Russia.

– If there were no cases of such tragic deaths of adopted children, no one would be against adoption abroad!

– How many people know that over almost 20 years, 18 orphans out of 91 thousand 861 children from Russia died abroad? And out of 158 thousand 974 children adopted by Russians according to the Ministry of Health and Social Development, over 15 years, starting in 1991, died 1220 children adopted by Russian citizens (!). And add to this that last year there were 8 thousand cases of foster parents abandoning the orphans they had taken. Every third adopted child is then returned to the orphanage.

The problem of orphans is deeper, the problem is in our attitude towards abandoned children: if we have this mentality, if we allow the number of abandoned children to grow, then society destroys itself, such a society has no future.

4 facts about orphans

• 105688 children , left without parental care, under supervision in organizations for orphans (2011)
• 15 000 children are returned by adoptive parents to orphanages per year
• 1220 adopted children died in 15 years in Russia ( 12 children were killed by their Russian adoptive parents, 23 were seriously injured by their adoptive parents).
• 19 children adopted abroad died within 18 years.

– Changing the mentality takes years and years. What do you see as the main problem of the orphanages themselves? Not enough resources, money?

– The state spends a colossal amount of money on a child. In most orphanages there are more staff than children.

– Probably, not all funds reach children, to put it mildly...

– I don’t think that the allocated money is stolen, I can’t imagine that the directors of orphanages will put children’s money in their pockets. No, but the money is spent very inefficiently.

– How does this manifest itself?

– Typical picture orphanage– day after day, teachers watch TV with children of all ages. Whenever you came, everyone froze together in front of the screen. Many children are catastrophically behind in development; they cannot be placed in even the simplest rural school; they must be educated! But when I ask the director of the orphanage what can be done to change the situation (what kind of developmental methods, programs, textbooks there are today!), she says that here the paint is peeling off, there hasn’t been any repairs for a long time, and there the door needs to be replaced! And he also repeats that it is necessary to punish parents who abandon their children. I have not heard any proposals for changes in the general educational and educational process! The director of the orphanage doesn’t even think about it. The people are sincere, the pies are delicious, but this has nothing to do with professional education.

- Well, repairs are also needed...

– Of course, repairs are needed, but look at children’s camps and boarding houses in Europe? Wealthy Europeans, who can afford any upbringing for their children, send their children to camps for the summer, and sometimes for permanent education in schools, where conditions are no better (and sometimes worse) than in Russian orphanages. True, our doors are painted green, it’s different there, but essentially the same. Rooms where four people sleep, where amenities are on the same floor, campuses with imperfect renovations, and a “school of survival” in which children from wealthy European families are taught how five of them can have lunch for 30 euros, for example. Parents welcome this and enroll their children in such camps in advance.

Today the state spends more on children than is often spent in families.

“But probably not much reaches the children...

“Children don’t get enough education!” I am far from thinking that people who work in orphanages steal. The system of work in the orphanage itself is ineffective: a lot of people are involved, but there is no understanding of what to do. Maybe there is no desire.

In my opinion, a lot of money is allocated, but the state cannot influence our mentality! This is our task, mine, yours. We need to move from social dependency to social responsibility. We need to move on to responsibility, replacing justice in some areas with the word efficiency.

– How to solve the problem systematically?

– If we talk about the system, we need to reduce the number of orphanages, create orphanages in large cities and place the main emphasis on the development and socialization of children.

– In small orphanages it is possible to pay much more attention to the child!

– The question is not how much attention to pay, but how! Children need to be taken care of. Sitting and watching TV all day is not the same as taking care of your child. And you can teach effectively to large groups.

– Change the staff?

- It's useless. Change the settings of the entire system. It should be aimed at the interests of children, and not at the interests of the state.

– What does this mean in practice?

“Any person who has encountered the adoption system experiences surreal difficulties. They often talk about documents, but there are a minimum of them, and all documents are really needed. But when parents become candidates for adoption and go to court, if you don’t know Mary Petrovna in your care, they won’t even talk to you. People come to me all the time and ask for help with guardianship contacts. If you just call the guardianship, it turns out that there are no children, you have to stand in line and go through all the circles of hell. No one cares about the interests of children...

– It is difficult to demand from teachers and educators such work as in Europe. There, a teacher is a prestigious and highly paid profession...

– Yes, the main issues lie in the field of education. It needs to be made more competitive and in demand. After all, you see, if you ask whether a teacher is a respected profession, everyone will say - of course! But if you ask whether you want your children to be teachers, what will they answer? Of course not!

Therefore, until society’s attitude changes towards who should raise children and how, towards orphans, towards the problem of priorities, towards education, nothing will change – and any grants and subsidies will not correct the situation.

Currently there is no clear public order for orphanages. Society doesn’t ask from orphanages, society doesn’t say: you spend incorrectly, you stole, you don’t educate enough! In general, in our society there is no order for efficiency. Just like in politics, there are no right-wing parties. Everyone crowded on the left flank. I don’t want to say that everything will be solved by, say, right-wing politics, but a whole layer is being lost, society lives according to the laws of dependency.

In middle and high schools, standards need to be changed. Students should vote for schools, choose schools. Partial commercialization of education is necessary. And the commercialization of education has already occurred, but it needs to be legalized! A lot needs to change in higher education. Nowadays, students sit through classes, somehow pass exams, just to get a diploma. But we need educational loans and educational grants for students, the money must be tied to a specific student, and the student can manage his investment himself. But if he pays for his education, he will have a completely different attitude towards the knowledge he receives.

– If you look at it more broadly, how do you think we should solve the demographic problem today?

– There is a global trend: the more we take responsibility for children, the fewer children there are. There's nothing to be done here. Existing state support for families leaves much to be desired, for example, the program maternity capital- completely incomprehensible. It does not change life significantly - it is an abstract promise: what will happen in 18 years, what the interest will be, how much it will cost - it is not clear. The only thing is that it’s good that at least some of your maternity capital can be paid for today: mortgage, studies, treatment.

– What should we change systemically?

- People's attitude. It’s good for the state to do everything. But the question of priorities is also important. The population is not focused on childbearing. You can give any social guarantees and conditions, but this will not make people have more children - look at the fall in the birth rate in Europe! Without changing priorities, the demographic problem cannot be solved.

In order for people to have children, the attitude towards the family needs to change. This requires both propaganda and social advertising, it is necessary to raise social prestige big family in society, we need cash registers for pregnant women, and kindergartens without queues, where it’s not scary to send your child, and good schools, where children study - but all these are not one-day programs. These are programs that last for years and years. Today you cannot introduce some kind of benefit, see that there are no more children, and cancel it. All programs must be long-term.

– At the beginning of the year, President D. Medvedev advised billionaires to go to schools and communicate with students. We sharply criticized this initiative of the President, and since then you have held conversations several times at your school in Odintsovo, how do you evaluate the experience?

- A C grade. Children treat the guest as a guru who needs to be asked something for show. And we need to develop partnerships with schoolchildren. So that they understand that they have a lot in their hands! That you need an idea and you need to work on the idea, then there will be growth.

– Your children are on homeschooling or do they study at a private school?

– No, those who are of school age go to Odintsovo school.

– I don’t ask how you cope, because with such a staff of nannies...

– We definitely try to teach the child independence and responsibility. For example, I prohibit nannies from following children over four years of age during walks: they walk near the house, but all bumps, scratches, abrasions, and bruises are normal. It is much worse if every step is under the control of adults and the child is unadapted to life after such refined conditions.

– Work-home balance...

– It’s bad, it’s not working out well, it’s biased towards work.

– What is your principle of time management?

– Trust.

– What is the most important thing you want to instill in your children?

– Children must learn what is good and what is bad. If they do not share my values, but at the same time make the right moral choice, my mission will be completed. And education gives you the opportunity to choose.

– Where do you derive the criterion of good and bad, as you explain?

– I don’t explain, I don’t hammer into it. I'm trying to start the mechanism so that they themselves understand. I enter into discussions and arguments with elders. We recently wrote the rules and daily routine together: we developed the rules together. We don’t lecture children, we have a system of punishments, this is an extreme measure, but rigorous.

– How do you distribute time and attention between children? After all, not everyone probably receives equal attention from their parents?

– Some people get more attention, for example, I have a 100-words-per-minute daughter, of course, she takes more attention. But we don’t deliberately divide attention in any way.

– It seems that you have more photographs of joint games with children than in business suit and a tie...

– In my childhood there were no such toys, so there is no need to force me to play with the children – who is more happy with these games is a big question!

Adopting countries

A difficult question, actually. Because it is believed that there are no orphanages (called orphanage) in the USA. Here is an extract from Wikipedia on this issue:

In the 20s of the 19th century, the first shelters were created in three large cities - New York, Philadelphia and Boston, which were intended to isolate children in danger from the corrupting environment of their homes and adult institutions and partially replace their family and community. However, the ineffectiveness of shelters and educational institutions as educational institutions was quickly revealed. Rather, they turned out to be a temporary refuge for the child in extreme situations.

Currently, in the United States, as well as in other developed countries, there are no orphanages for permanent residence of children. There are temporary shelters for children until the child is placed in a foster family (often this is not about adoption, but about keeping the child in a family that is paid compensation).

In 2010, there were 408 thousand children in the US foster care system. 48% of them (194 thousand children) lived with non-relative foster parents, 26% (103 thousand) lived in foster families of relatives, 6% (25 thousand) lived in group homes, 9% (37 thousand) lived in institutions. 50-60% of children from the foster care system return to their parents. About 100 thousand children from the foster care system are awaiting adoption. Approximately 50 thousand children are adopted from foster care each year; in half of the cases, they are adopted by the foster parents themselves. Adoption from a foster system has the lowest cost or is completely free.

If we translate it into understandable language, then children who find themselves without a family are assigned to families that raise them (foster families). Here is the beginning of the article about foster:

Americans are well known for their unconventional approach to solving any problem. Few people know that every year, due to the most various reasons Over one hundred thousand children are left without parents or relatives, but there are virtually no orphanages in the United States.

The system for distributing single children in America is called “foster,” which translated into Russian means “to educate, care for, patronize.” The essence of this system is as follows: children left without parental care almost immediately end up in foster family, whose members expressed a desire to shelter the child in advance.

Terry Kramer, an official with the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), says, “Imagine a 5-year-old losing his mom, dad, and grandparents on the same day... The best we can What we can do for the child in this situation is to send him to a family where he will undergo a course of psychological adaptation.”

Statistics show that on average a child lives in a foster family for about 12 months. For example, married couple Tony and Geraldine Whitburn from Oregon have fostered about sixty children in their lifetime.

“Most of our students have biological parents who are alive, but they are either in prison or have been deprived of parental rights,” says Geraldine. “Unfortunately, we cannot completely replace their parents for children. American laws are structured in such a way that it is very difficult to adopt a child with living parents.”

However, there are shelters, and there are quite a lot of shelters in America. Basically, this is done by various religious organizations. Just to give an example, I found one such, very characteristic shelter under called Boys Town.

This orphanage was established by Reverend Father Flanagan in 1917. That is, Boys Town has been operating for over 90 years. Here is their website: http://www.boystown.org/ And here is a short video in English:

This guy is a former student, and now he works there. Boys Town is a whole network of shelters across America. Here's a picture. If you click, you will be taken to this page on the Boys Town website.

There are 3,360 shelters or shelters in the United States. This is only for the homeless, because there are other categories. Here is a picture with a link where you can find a shelter near where you live:

And here is a website that shows shelters for women. In particular, for those who have been subjected to domestic violence. The picture is also clicked and you are taken to their website:

There are also shelters for homeless animals, but today we are not talking about them. I’ll tell you some other time, because the topic is also live.

Well, now the conclusion. There really are no orphanages as such in America. I mean government institutions that would educate homeless children.

But there are plenty of other organizations that do this. All of them are subsidized, that is, they exist on donations. Mainly private individuals.

In addition, there is a foster system in which there is a constant and non-decreasing queue. So children who are left without parents almost immediately end up in such families.

That's it, probably. Ask if anything is unclear. Although I'm not an expert on American orphans either. True, I worked as a doctor in an orphanage near Moscow, but that’s a completely different story.

It turns out that for every one million couples who have the courage to have a second child, there are about half a million orphans in China. According to official statistics, at the end of 2014, 515 thousand children in China live in orphanages and the same number are adopted or “remain under public guardianship.” The total number of abandoned children in China reaches a million, and the dynamics are saddening: 500 thousand in 2009, 715 thousand in 2012 and already one million in 2014. In China, about 100 thousand orphans are registered annually.

Such figures amaze even professionals working with China. for a long time. In the state family values- China, where a child is called the “little emperor”, where on the streets, buildings, and everywhere you can see images of laughing babies - half a million children are abandoned. Naturally, for a country with a billion people, this number is not very large, but against the backdrop of the decreasing desire of the Chinese to have a second child, this is a completely unambiguous signal about the disturbing erosion of family values ​​in the state.

The problem became so serious that in October 2010, for the first time in history, the national government of the Celestial Empire started talking about orphans, for whose needs they allocated 2.5 billion yuan (about $400 million). To date, over 800 reception centers for abandoned children have been opened in China. There are about 4,500 orphanages in the republic, most of which are private, where 990 thousand children can live.

For a long time, no one was able to answer how many orphans there actually are in China, until the Ministry of Education first took up this issue in 2005. The study showed that at that time there were about 573 thousand minor orphans living in mainland China, 90% of whom lived in rural areas. Most of these children are in the Tibetan region, even more than in the megacities of Beijing and Shanghai. Among them are many children who have lost their parents as a result of natural disasters - earthquakes that claim lives are not at all uncommon in the South-West region of the country. However, the main reason for the rapid increase in the number of orphans is provoked by the refusal of relatives to take custody of the baby after receiving a subsidy from the government.

Orphanages for children whose parents are arrested

Sunvillage, an orphanage in Beijing, has been operating for about 20 years, and during this period it has “raised” approximately 2,000 orphans. Today about 100 children live there. They are children of prisoners. Because of their background, they are unable to receive the necessary sympathy from others. These children are completely healthy and for this reason cannot qualify for government subsidies. The only thing they can count on is help from volunteer associations consisting of company employees, sports teams, show business participants, students, and foreign citizens. Another source of profit for the orphanage is the sale of vegetables and fruits grown on the territory of the orphanage.

Disabled children

Taiyun, children's rehabilitation center for children with hearing impairment. There are approximately 200 thousand children in China with hearing problems. Every year this number increases by 30 thousand.

Surgery performed before age 7 increases the possibility of hearing improvement by 90%. However, to perform an operation on one ear you need 20 thousand yuan (approximately two to three times the average salary of a city resident), and not every family is able to afford this. On the territory of this orphanage, approximately one hundred children are being raised, most of whom are incapacitated boys from nearby provinces. There is a serious influx of children here, since neighboring cities do not have the appropriate personnel to interact with children. But such children cannot count on support from the government because of their registration - in the PRC, to this day, there is a system of “attaching” citizens to a certain province with the help of health insurance, pensions, bank accounts and other things. Last year, the orphanage almost lost its building because the tenant wanted to transfer it to a more solvent user.

*Madrassah is the name of Muslim educational institutions. In this case, it is also an orphanage.

As Nasif himself says: “I don’t know exactly how many Madrasahs are scattered throughout the country. But I know for sure that thousands of children study and live in such houses. Some of them were brought by parents themselves who are not able to fully take care of their children, others are orphans. But what is most depressing is not this, but the fact that orphanages in Bangladesh are very far from their modern counterparts. In addition to the difficult living conditions for children, the teachers in such institutions are poorly educated and cannot fully educate the children. who, although they have the right to enter more decent universities after completing training at Madrasah, but due to the small number of chances, have few opportunities for enrollment.
Also in Bangladeshi homes, punishments for offenses ranging from simple deprivation of watching TV to solitary confinement in a small room and physical beatings are still practiced.
Most orphans, upon reaching adulthood, remain to live and work in the Madrasah. And many of them, having become adults, because of what they received improper upbringing and receiving a distorted idea of ​​the religion of Islam, they treat the children living in the Madrasah as cruelly as they were once treated. "

Nasif Imtiaz noted: “In most cases, the life of children in Madrassas is no different from the life of slaves who have to work for food. But despite this, each of them enjoys life in their own way.
I hope that as adults they keep their pure hearts and will not be like the examples of their teachers. "

In Israel, in general, they love children very much and treat them with reverence. Thus, newlyweds do not “live for themselves,” but immediately after the wedding they think about a child. If he does not appear a year after they started life together, they contact the artificial insemination center. Moreover, expensive procedures paid by the state. Children are abandoned very rarely in Israel, but if this happens, the child is immediately adopted. Moreover, women who want to have an abortion are interviewed and offered to give birth to a baby and give it up for adoption, receiving a significant reward for this.
However, unfortunately, there are not entirely honest “mothers” who try to make money from this situation by extorting money from adoptive parents. The fact is that in Israel there is a law protecting the rights of biological parents. Within a year after abandoning the child, they can change their mind and return it. This is explained by the complex psychological state of a woman who has just given birth, whose postpartum depression, combined with fear of the unknown future that awaits her and the child, pushes the mother to a rash act. Oddly enough, the child is the last thing they think about, as well as the adoptive parents. Although it would be worth thinking about them. After all, the biological mother, if she really decides to return the child, does so within several days (which still takes place to complete the paperwork). Within a year, the baby becomes like family to the adoptive parents, and he already understands everything and considers them his parents. Pick up practically one year old child from some parents and giving it to others is a big stress for the child. But the law is the law, and it is strictly observed.
There is a well-known case about how adoptive parents went to court, from whom, six months after the birth of the child, the mother who came to her senses, who had received a reward at the time of adoption, began to extort money. In court, it was clear to everyone present that the biological parents (by that time there had also been a father, who had previously not been interested in the birth of a baby) did not need the child, they only wanted to squeeze more money out of the situation. However, the court decision was given in favor of the biological parents. But the adoptive parents did not despair and continued to fight for the child in court. While the proceedings were dragging on, the child turned two years old. It turned out that the child's father was terminally ill, and only this swayed the judges in favor of the adoptive parents. Fearing that the baby would end up on the street, they decided to give the child to foster parents.
In general, an Israeli orphanage is a place where the child waits until all necessary documents for adoption. This place can be different: children are sent to families that already have their own children, and the family looks after other people’s children for a fee. Schoolchildren are placed in a boarding school, but it is strikingly different from a Russian orphanage.

Sick children are kept in hospitals. They are constantly visited by volunteers who, if they want to adopt a child they know, receive priority. One such volunteer organization is Hibuk Rishon, which means “First Embrace.” The number of families who wish to adopt a foster child greatly exceeds the number of children in need of a foster family. Sick and disabled children are not left without attention.
In Israel, there is no such thing as street children, in principle. Here we are ready to adopt any child who has lost his parents. This state of affairs best characterizes society! People who care about children, not only their own, but also others, think about the future of their country.