Appropriate Care

Protecting children from violence includes supporting safe and nurturing caregivers. Decades of research has shown that when caregivers are sensitive and responsive to a child’s needs, they help the child develop physically, emotionally, and socially. This is how we learn to talk, learn that we are important, that we are loved, and that we can depend on others. Families, when safe and nurturing, are often the most important protective environment in a young child’s life. When most people hear the term “orphan” they think of a child with no parents, but research has shown that four out of five of children in childcare institutions globally have parents. While children are placed in child care institutions due to a variety of different reasons including: violence, abuse, parental illness, HIV/AIDs, migration, disabilities, or humanitarian disaster, the vast majority of children globally are being placed in child care institutions due to poverty or the hope to access an education. Rather than unnecessarily separate children from their caregivers, Save the Children supports caregivers and extended family to care for their children, linking them to the support they need; reuniting families that have been separated and working to strengthen child protection systems. We do this through: Preventing separation: parenting skills including our Parenting without Violence Common Approach; addressing the main reasons children and families separate including stigma and discrimination. Response: strengthening the social welfare workforce, de-institutionalisation, family tracing & reunification, and supporting alternative family-based care. Legal & Policy Change: advocating to ban Physical and Humiliating Punishment, supporting international and national guidance and regulations on alternative care and orphanage tourism