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
Although accurate estimates are difficult to obtain, there are a great many vulnerable children in Latin America and the Caribbean, and institutionalization is a traditional means of caring for children without parental care. Currently efforts are being made to revise child welfare systems in the region, emphasizing deinstitutionalization and family care alternatives. The world literature justifies this strategy and shows that traditional institutions for infants and young children are often socially-emotionally depriving and neglectful environments and resident children display poor physical, cognitive, and social-emotional development. A review of the few empirical studies of such institutions in Latin America has produced similar findings. However, interventions within institutions fostering warm, sensitive, and responsive caregiver-child interactions and changes in the environment to support such interactions have produced substantial improvements in resident children’s development in Latin America and elsewhere. Improvements in child welfare systems should emphasize comprehensive family support practices and family alternatives to institutionalization and guidelines are provided in this chapter, but institutions also should be improved as long as children reside there so the new systems support all vulnerable children.