This chapter appears in Child Maltreatment in Residential Care: History, Research, and Current Practice, a volume of research examining the institutionalization of children, child abuse and neglect in residential care, and interventions preventing and responding to violence against children living in out-of-home care settings around the world.
Abstract
This chapter describes the history of institutions for young orphan children and children left without parental care, in the Russian Federation (RF), and changes made in this system during last two decades. The St. Petersburg Baby Home study “The Effects of Improving Caregiving on Early Mental Health” aimed at demonstrating the role of early caregiver-child social-emotional experiences on orphanage children’s mental health and development, and its main results are described. Maintaining a social-emotional intervention in baby homes after the intervention project ended, and the follow-up study of children transitioned to St. Petersburg (RF) families is presented. The training and structural changes and the baby home model with the sensitive, responsive, stable, and consistent “family-like” caregiving environment developed in St. Petersburg Baby Home project were successfully disseminated in the other baby homes of RF, with the subsequent changes of the Russian legislation and regulations on the system of care for children left without parental care.