Every child needs a family. It is crucial for a child to thrive and belong.
At the moment there are around 4000 thousand children living in care institutions in Lithuania. Children would like to return to their origin families, but because of insufficient work with their parents, they often do not have such an opportunity. A care institution, which should be just a temporary place for a young person, unfortunately, becomes a permanent living place. A child grows up and does not return to his parents, gets tired of unfulfilled dreaming, loses any hope, does not feel needed, because does not find people, he could love or feel loved by. Children, who grow up in care institutions, often do not know, how to adapt and live in society, they try to create their own families, but often repeat their parents‘ history. Foster parents could help to break this vicious circle. Children, who grow up with foster parents, have more opportunities to grow up as independent individuals, find their place in the life, discover and realize their potential, learn, how to love, dream and feel as a part of society.
However, foster parents face many challenges, which cannot be tackled without professional help. It is not the same to bring up children, who are separated from their origin families, as to bring up your own children. You need more love, patience, skills and knowledge. When a child becomes a teenager, foster parents often cannot cope with all challenges, which they face on their own, and do not get any effective help and support from others. As a result, they give up and decide not to foster that child and he returns back to a care institution. Therefore we want to prevent that and offer help to the people who do such a valuable favour to our society.
About the project. Foster parents experience a huge pressure from society, because of many negative attitudes towards them. It is often thought that their motivation is material gain. In addition to this, it is expected that they should be perfect in upbringing children and not make any mistakes. This project aims to break such attitudes and offer efficient support to foster parents to help them to do very valuable work, requiring huge resources of patience, love and skills- to bring up children, who lost their parents‘care. We also aim to increase public awareness about foster care. During the project foster parents will learn how to meet the needs of their foster children in a better way, improve their fostering skills, learn efficient ways of problem solving and strengthen their motivation for foster care. Foster families will learn, how to support each other. The most importantly, that after receiving an efficient support the number of children living in institutional care will decrease, the quality of life of foster parents and children will improve and the risk that children would end up in institutional care again will be significantly reduced. Besides this, the project will contribute to the creation of favourable public opinion towards fostering and will support current foster parents, who will become a positive example for others.
Collected funds will be used for organizing activities in the period from January to December.