Prague, Oct 8 (CTK) – Some 98 percent of Czech children who end up in care of professional foster parents are sent from them to an alternative family or return home, and only 1.5 percent go to institutional care, according to a survey that the Lumos organisation presented Thursday.
Less than 1 percent of these children are sent to another temporary foster care.
Children spend 6.5 months on average in with professional foster parents.
Temporary foster care was introduced in the Czech Republic in 2006. It was not used in the first years very often.
The situation has considerably changed since 2013 thanks to an amendment to the law on children’s protection that prefers family care to institutions.
However, there are also many opponents, including MPs, to professional foster care. Critics argue that it is of a low quality, that people do it just for money and children must go from one foster family to another.
The survey has refuted these arguments, Lumos said.
It was carried out among about 100 of 254 professional foster parents in seven regions in June.
According to the Labour and Social Affairs Ministry’s data, 421 professional foster parents were in the Czech Republic at the end of last year.
The survey shows that 47 percent of children left temporary foster care for adoptive parents, some 26 percent were sent to their relatives, 2 percent returned to their biological mother or father and 8 percent to a broader family. Under 2 percent were sent to an alternative family abroad. Only 0.8 percent were transferred to other professional foster parents and 1.5 percent returned to children’s homes.
“Only three children went to an institution and two to other foster families,” Barbora Krizanova, from Lumos, told CTK.
About two-thirds of children looked after by professional foster parents were less than six months old, 12 percent were from six months to two years and one in 20 was aged six to 12 years.
The situation of a half of the children was resolved within five months.
Professional foster parents are 48 years old on average. The youngest was aged 33 years and the oldest 62. The most typical professional foster parent is a woman between 40 and 55 years, Kacirkova said.
Almost four-fifths of such foster parents are at least secondary school graduates.
“It has turned out that foster parents for a temporary period are more educated than the Czech population of the same age on average,” Kacirkova said.
Last year, 47 percent of Czechs aged 36-64 years were secondary-school or university and college graduates.
Professional foster parents say they mostly decided to choose this work because they wanted to prevent children from staying in institutional care and they also wished to do something meaningful in life, while financial remuneration was the least important reason.
Three-quarters of them had also another job along with being a foster parent, one-tenth were at home and 14 percent were unemployed.
Kacirkova pointed to a strict selection of the applicants for becoming professional foster parents.
Lumos is promoting family care, striving for big childcare institutions being turned into more friendly services for children and their families.
