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Seeing the Trees Within the Forest: Addressing the Needs of Children Without Parental Care in the Russian Federation
Author(s) -
Muhamedrahimov Rifkat J.,
Grigorenko Elena L.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
new directions for child and adolescent development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.628
H-Index - 59
eISSN - 1534-8687
pISSN - 1520-3247
DOI - 10.1002/cad.20080
Subject(s) - legislation , russian federation , promotion (chess) , resource (disambiguation) , psychology , quality (philosophy) , public relations , political science , developmental psychology , economic growth , sociology , law , regional science , economics , computer network , politics , computer science , philosophy , epistemology
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. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.