Children Need Care, Youth Need a Policy

The government seems bent on seriously tackling the problems of the younger generation. As The Day has already reported, the Cabinet is now dealing with this issue. What really matters is not that hours-long debates have assumed the classical form “understand, expand, and deepen” but that ministers have recognized the very existence of and discussed the problem. Last Friday Radio Kyiv aired a live discussion of this subject with participation of the minister for youth and sports. The program was aptly named “Youth Policies: for Youth or for Politicians? The Ministry’s Plans for the Year 2005.” The President was also up to the mark. After attending a roundtable on children’s rights protection, Viktor Yushchenko said he was going to sign a decree to this effect. The draft decree calls for redistribution of child custody powers between educational authorities and the Ministry for the Family, Youth, and Sports. Child care and custody matters are now the preserve of children services, previously known as underage persons services.

The Cabinet was instructed that the 2006 draft state budget should include expenditures for keeping up orphans and children abandoned by their parents at the level at least as high as official subsistence wages.

Besides, the Cabinet is to solve in 2005 the problem of introducing new effective forms of preventing social orphanage, establishing mother-and-child centers and social hostels, and increasing the number of social and psychological rehabilitation centers, Interfax-Ukraine reports. The Cabinet was also instructed to analyze, before August 1, 2005, the financial state of family-type orphanages and foster homes, as well as to take measures for improving this state.

The Ministry for the Family, Youth and Sports is to approve, before August 1, the procedure of establishing a data bank on the orphaned and abandoned children.

Psychologists claim that split families are far from always the main cause of social orphanage. The Institute for Family and Youth Problems has polled boys and girls aged 15 and below about differences between maternal and paternal care. The result is that only 11% of men take their children to doctors and a mere 10% tend a sick child. In the vast majority of cases, the mother usually helps do homework. She also performs such a function as taking her children from the school or day- care facility, with only 24% of fathers also “shouldering this burden.” What about men? Experts say that, to put it crudely, they “pay themselves off” children, reducing their family duties to earning money. The thus make a grave mistake because, in psychological terms, it is difficult to overestimate upbringing given by the father. The child often ends up on the street just because s/he has no full-fledged family.