Who Am I and Where Am I From? Substitute Residential Home Children’s Insights into Their Lives and Individual Identities

Abstract

Decisions regarding children’s residential care reorganisation are primarily based on an adult’s perspective of children’s wellbeing and care. While these adults tend to be well-intended and base their decisions off relevant evidence, the children’s perspectives ‐ which reflects their actual lived experiences ‐ is almost never considered. However, since children are experts of their own lives, they should have the right to participate and express their opinion: Their point of view could be of great value in developing residential child care. In this article, we provide SOS children’s insights into their own life experiences and individual identities. The data was collected during an ethnographic research in one of Estonia’s SOS Children’s Villages (SOS CV). This article aims to answer to following research questions: 1. What are the main topics in SOS children’s stories when they talk about themselves and their everyday lives in substitute homes? 2. What kind of identity can be determined from children’s stories? 3. How can the subtext within the children’s stories be used to develop a child-centred residential care? In this article, we present and discuss several key-findings. First, it is important to note that there are gaps in the children’s life stories, as they sometimes lack information about important people and events in their lives. Second, this lack of adequate information can damage the children's identities and, in turn, undermine their development. Third, the opportunity to talk about important life events encourages the children to ask questions, as they are interested in obtaining additional information to complete the gaps. Fourth, the children’s stories indicate the shortcomings of substitute homes, related to both culture and communication.     

Fertility and childbearing practices among poor Gypsy women in Hungary: the intersections of class, race and gender

This article explores changes in childbearing practices among Gypsy (Roma) women in a small village in Northern Hungary. The author benefited from several years of ethnographic field research and data collected in this village, where the proportion of the out-of-wedlock births and births to teenage—mostly Gypsy—mothers have increased by a factor of three in the past 10 years as the population of the village has become more and more impoverished and the opportunities for geographic or social mobility declined sharply for the ethnic minority. The author argues that bearing children early is a sign of passage to adulthood in this group of women, a function which had been assigned to other social institutions before 1989. Early childbearing at the same time exacerbates the problem of Gypsy women: this is the first study which documents the consequences of poverty on women’s and children’s health by showing an increase in low birth weight babies in the community since 1989.     

Body Dissatisfaction,Living Away from Parents,and Poor Social Adjustment Predict Binge Eating Symptoms in Young Women Making the Transition to University

The current study explored how body dissatisfaction and challenges associated with the transition to university predicted symptoms of binge eating. Participants were 101 female full-time first-year university students (M=18.3 years of age; SD=.50) who completed a background questionnaire and a web-based daily checklist assessing binge eating. Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling results showed that participants who were more dissatisfied with their bodies were three times as likely to report symptoms of binge eating compared to participants who were less dissatisfied. Participants who lived away from home were three times as likely to report symptoms of binge eating compared to participants living with parents. Finally, poor perceived social adjustment to the university context was associated with an increased likelihood of binge eating. Discussion calls for more research exploring the role that university challenges and adjustment play in predicting eating problems.

The Estonian way of deinstitutionalisation. Experiences from an ethnographic research in SOS Children’s Village

This study provides insight into change processes of child residential care as depicted by ethnographic research on Estonian SOS Children’s Villages (SOS CV). Through the analysis of daily life in substitute homes, this study aimed to gain an in-depth and contextualised understanding of this deinstitutionalisation process. The changing approach of SOS CVs from institutional village-life-based to community-based approaches where nonbiological children are raised is discussed. The interpretation of said changes as deinstitutionalisation and their complicated nature is outlined. The latter is attributed to the divergent effects of activities. The findings ultimately lead to the conclusion that such change processes result in both challenges and difficulties to the Estonian substitute care system.